


illusion never changed (into something real)

by miscreants



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eliot Waugh Deserves Happiness, Fix-It, M/M, Memory Loss, Post-Monster Body Trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Quentin Coldwater Lives, Slow Build, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:01:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 41,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24174793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miscreants/pseuds/miscreants
Summary: It's been a week and a half since Eliot was almost split in two by Margo Hanson's axe, and he can't stop hearing voices.Well, one in particular.And what happens in fifteen minutes in the underworld doesn't necessarily have to stay there.
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 178
Kudos: 223





	1. (what's past is) prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OneHandedBooks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneHandedBooks/gifts).



> OOOOOOH BOY.
> 
> hello hello hello, and welcome to my FIRST FIC IN 10 YEARS. seriously, the last time i posted fic, it was on livejournal. woof.
> 
> this fic is going to be heavy at first, with serious exploration into eliot's PTSD post-monster, but there's a lot of light in it, too. i hope i do him the justice he wasn't done. there will be warnings posted at the end of every chapter for things you might want to watch out for, and i'll be sure to let you know if there's anything seriously triggering. check the tags for updates, as this is a work in progress!
> 
> i want to thank Holly (peacefrog) for being the most wonderful beta/cheerleader i could ask for, as well as deja (kinneyb) and and dot and gael for their encouragement forward. i also just have the best friends a girl/void cat can ask for, so for everyone who is my friend, y'all are the best. thanks for helping me continue to write, for the first time in years.
> 
> this was a gift from the not alone here auction i helped lead on twitter for onehandedbooks! i really, really hope i am giving you something you can adore as much as i've had fun writing it. the prompt i clung onto was "fix-it" and, well, i took it and ran. fast and far.
> 
> and with that, i think that's everything i have to give to you right now! please enjoy this love letter to eliot waugh and quentin coldwater, who are currently curled up on the couch in their living room, watching a romcom, eating popcorn, and being stupidly in love.
> 
> PS: if your name rhymes with stale nappleman, shoo. go away. why are you here.

Eliot barely looks up from where he’s cocooned underneath the weighted blanket. “Not now, Margo,” he says. “Daddy’s looking at tombstones.”

To her credit, Margo only slightly trips up at that, her eyebrow ticking upwards a notch before falling back down into resting bitch position. “Do they have ones in glitter? He would’ve loved that.”

“I don’t think we’re talking about the same Quentin here.” Eliot grimaces as he shifts into position, back straight against the tufted headboard. He’s been meaning to tell Kady that it’s tacky, that the suede-like material is dated, and he’s half-surprised there’s not a vinyl sticker on the greige walls that says _live laugh love,_ but he’s not going to look a gift battle magician in the fangs. “But also, no. I already checked.”

The little spoon Margo’s holding between her first finger and thumb dings the side of the porcelain teacup she’s holding, and Eliot wants to make a _Get Out_ reference so bad. It would be hilarious and timely and charming, he’s sure. But the all-too-familiar pain that’s become his bedfellow shoots down his side as she crawls into the bed next to him, shifting the mattress with her.

“Don’t be a baby,” she chides. It’s too quiet to be an actual scolding, lacks a little bit of her normal vigor. She brushes her messy waves over her shoulder as she leans over to see what Eliot’s looking at on the glowing nightmare square that is Twenty-Three’s iPad. He and Josh had bought matching ones, for some reason. Unclear. Doesn’t matter.

“I am baby,” Eliot mutters petulantly as his thumb stutters on the screen. It’s hot underneath his fingertips.

“Sure you are, sweetie,” Margo says as she kisses his cheek.

She shifts closer to him and leans her head on his shoulder. She’s all-too-careful to make sure their sides don’t press together, and the burning awareness that comes with the large gash of red stitched into his skin above his hips thanks her.

Eliot’s never been good at this shit. None of them have, he supposes. None of them have ever had to effectively bury another human being, sans body, in a respectful and state sanctioned way. He doesn’t want to make any assumptions about potential other human burials. Eliot has no qualms about his ragtag bunch of misfits. They aren’t exactly a claymation Christmas special.

But even as a kid, when the summers were hot and the dirt under his feet got soft once the gravelly ground gave way to a hoe, his goodbyes had been shit. He’d always been the one to run before the words were said, because it was easier to just give up the ghost on something doomed than to wait until it failed him.

And hell. He had famously stood in front of Logan Kinnear’s grave, his father’s hand like a stake between his shoulder blades, and felt _nothing._ Like the next day the bastard was going to show up around the corner, his thin, crusty lips curled into a snarl as always, uglier than a pig’s snout, and the words on the tombstone would melt away the next time it rained.

When he hadn’t shown up the next day at school, Eliot had settled for the explanation that he was on a permanent vacation, and someday they would meet in the land of fire and brimstone and have it out. See you in Hell, bitch.

“Remind me why I was put in charge of this again?” he asks. There’s a headache crawling, in-between his eyes. It’s a constant companion these days, along with the pain in his side. Eliot feels like he can’t consider himself single anymore with these two keeping him company.

And then there’s the third musketeer, a persistent—like, _way too persistent_ —voice that’s growing louder all the time, makes it hard to think in his normal, much more familiar (and quite frankly, wittier) internal monologue.

_Okay, but you weren’t? Like, maybe I didn’t see everything—I mean, I did, but even if I didn’t, you like, weren’t. Put in charge of this. And as for the, you know, the alone thing—_

“You weren’t,” Margo says, firm. “You volunteered as tribute for some dumb fucking reason, when you should be sleeping 18 hours a day and gaining hibernation weight and keeping up with the Kardashians.”

“I’m caught up. I’ve kept up.” Eliot sighs. He rubs his thumb between his brows. Counts to three. Rolls his head back to stretch his neck. “Kendall’s still the gay one and no one wants to admit it. It’s _boring._ ”

Margo takes a sip of tea. “So we’re going to pick out a headstone for our best friend instead?” She says it with the same lilt as a scolding soccer mom— _So we just jump off a bridge if our friends do, too, huh?_ —and she’s reaching over to scroll on her own, but Eliot knows the concern underneath it all. He speaks fluent Margo, practically a native; he knows all the idioms and the turns of phrase and how, when she says _our best friend,_ she’s really saying a thousand different things at once, some of which she doesn’t even understand fully. Can’t understand fully, really.

“I think the classic grey cement is a little too boring,” he replies, his throat growing dry. “But marble is a little too Graeco-Roman.” Easier to discuss death rocks than _best friend best friend best friend._

The voice, again, louder—

_What’s wrong with best friend? Eliot, come on, answer me—like, okay, I get it, but like—fuck’s sake—_

“So I think,” he gasps out, sitting up a little too fast, “maybe some sort of like, slate? Do you think we can have gilded gold lettering?”

“Who are we shopping for, here?” Margo presses the home button and the little one on the side of the screen that makes it go black. She gently takes the iPad from his hands and sets it on the nightstand on her side of the bed, and Eliot lolls his head to the side to peer at her.

“Are we going to try and have a serious talk again? Because you know that really makes my dick limp.”

“Have you even got it up since I axed your ass?”

“Technically, you axed my side,” he parries.

“Well, it doesn’t exactly wet my cunt, either,” Margo shrugs, “but we can’t look for tombstones and pretend like we’re just throwing some sort of ooky spooky birthday party.” Part of her very carefully (and very beautifully) constructed wall starts to crumble, and he can feel the vulnerability radiating off her. “Eliot. I’m here. I went through this, too. We all did.”

 _No, you didn’t,_ and thank gods it’s his voice this time. _You didn’t lose him like I did._

And then, like a scream, like a banshee’s cry, louder than a firework, _the_ voice:

_You didn’t lose me, you dickhead! I’m right here!_

“Shut _up,_ ” Eliot snaps, and Margo rears her head back, blinking at him like he’s just said that Todd could join them on their end of the year trip after all. “No, I—fuck, Margo. Not you.”

“Is there someone under the bed?” she says, a little too quickly. She’s hurt, Eliot knows.

“No.” Eliot sighs, pinching his nose, his side throbbing. He lurches forward and bile rises in his throat. Fuck, he shouldn’t have eaten those crackers earlier. “No, sorry, I just. It’s—I don’t want to talk about this. I’m _fine._ ”

His face twists into a contorted version of normalcy, the smile all wrong, his eyes crinkled more in pain than in contentment.

“You don’t get to tell me to shut up,” Margo pushes, because she doesn’t take shit from anyone, especially not Eliot. “Let me say that again: You don’t get to tell _me_ to shut up. Not when I’m trying to get your head dislodged from where it’s stuck in your ass. Well, not ever,” she presses on. “Even on your wedding day, but _especially_ not now.”

He nods. It’s the best he can give her at the moment. Fuck, he needs a cigarette. And thank gods his telekinesis is still intact, even if his guts and gross bits feel like they’re floating around under his skin, because some benevolent part of his mind reaches out and remembers he’s stashed a pack in the top of the dresser, and it glides over to him like a homecoming.

Margo sighs, but wordlessly waves her hand in a _go ahead, I can’t stop you from being an idiot._ It’s not like she hasn’t tried.

Eliot takes the Nat Sherman from its pack and holds it up. “See?” he says, pointing at the foiled gold filter against the black paper. “It’s classy. We could have _class_ on this tombstone.”

_Are you—are you comparing my tombstone to a cigarette?_

“I cannot believe you’re comparing a tombstone to a cigarette,” Margo says, but there’s a small bit of laughter in her voice. “Jesus Christ.”

The fire in his lungs is soothing—the one that he’s breathing in, not the one that’s infinitely crackling beneath his ribs. He’s constantly feeling like when he breathes out, there should be soot and smoke and sparks. At least now the outside matches the in.

Margo plucks the cigarette from his fingers and pops it in her mouth, takes her own drag and exhales heavily. “Let it rest for now,” she says. “In fact, _you_ rest for now. We’re going to talk about the funeral later tonight, together.”

“Before or after we play _Yahtzee_?”

He’s lucky she doesn’t drive the end of the cigarette into his arm. Hell, he’s lucky she doesn’t jam it right into his gash. “Rest,” she says again, “or I’m going to have Josh come in here and give you a lap dance.”

“You wouldn’t,” he gasps dramatically, taking the cigarette back. “Come on, you don’t want me stealing your man. He is still your man, right?”

Margo rolls her eyes and stands up. “Yes, El.”

“One tragedy after another,” he mutters, watching the smoke curl up towards the ceiling from the burning end of the cigarette.

Margo flicks him off, which is well deserved for at least three fourths of the conversation, so Eliot will take it. He blows her a kiss back. He has to admit, she’s right—he is tired. He’s always fucking tired these days, like his energy is constantly leaking out of the axe wound in his side. _Lucky to be alive,_ his ass. No one was lucky to be alive. It was the unluckiest thing in the world.

“Sleep,” Margo says, even as Eliot’s eyes start to get heavier and he begins to sink down underneath the weighted blanket again, even as he begins to drift. The voice in his head is gone for now, retreated back into whatever hallucination hell hole it crawled out from, and he’s not sure if the silence is blissful or unnerving. Unlucky, unlucky, unlucky.

He should’ve stayed dead.

* * *

Eliot wasn’t quite sure what the hallmarks of growing up were for repressed, traumatized homos who killed their local bullies with their minds and got scared of jacking off after realizing they could make fire with their hands, but if he had to guess, he’s pretty sure trawling the internet for spells and Googling “how to do magic but not Harry Potter” would be a huge part of it.

The summer after Logan Kinnear had been spent sneaking onto the family computer late at night, long after his brothers were finished trying to seduce girls over the phone, or pranking their teachers whose numbers they had found in the phone book. He had trawled AngelFire sites and Livejournal communities and AIM chatrooms for ways to recreate the time he accidentally bent a spoon or woke up levitating, only to come up short every time.

It turns out, a lot of people on the internet lie for attention. Who knew.

But in between discovering cybering for the first time (with someone who, in retrospect, was probably _not_ who they said they were) and torrenting episodes of _Queer as Folk_ burning them to DVD’s, episode by episode, he picked up a few things.

One of them sticks in his mind, even now: that dreaming, according to some magic enthusiast on Geocities, was astral projection without lucidity.

Well. Call him a regular fucking Penny, because every fucking night now—and afternoon, and mid-morning, and whenever else his body decides to just peace out on him—he finds himself travelling to the same place.

The first few times, it had been unnerving. The next few, scary.

Now? It’s just fucking annoying that every time his eyes slide closed and the world goes black, he finds himself here, metal surrounding him on all four walls, a 7x7 box suspended in an infinitely long shaft going down to what he could only assume is _The Underworld._

Some fucking good astral projection was doing, if he can’t go to the coast of Greece or spy on whatever Uncle Jesse from _Full House_ is doing right now. He remembers every single waking second of the dreams, from the slow descent of floors, numbers ticking down from 20 to _U,_ to the part where the door opens up, the light blinds him, and he’s surrounded by white for one numbing second before…

“Eliot,” Quentin breathes. Every time, in that same voice, like he had when Eliot had told him _I’m alive in here._ Like there was another trickster god out there who had seen the tenderest, most vulnerable moment of Eliot’s life and put it in a wind-up toy, a Jack-in-the-box of _fuck you, fuck you, fuck you._ Like the cruelest fucking clockwork.

That’s where it stops, the first few times. Elevator, down down down to the Underworld, boom, white light, eyes adjusting, Quentin, _Eliot,_ wake up. Rinse, repeat.

It’s only after the voice starts getting louder that the dreams go longer.

“Eliot,” Quentin breathes. “Eliot, hey—hey! You’re—you’re staying around this time!”

And then he had woke up.

The next time:

“Eliot,” Quentin breathes. “Hey, stay with me—stay with me. Okay? Don’t wake up, I have to—”

Margo had walked in.

And the next time:

“Eliot! Wedon’thavemuchtimebutIneedtotalktoyouthisisimport—”

Fucking _hell._

Every time he wakes up, his head and heart pound in time, throbbing to the same beat, and the gash in his side aches like a motherfucker. Lipson had supposedly _sped up_ the healing process, so he wasn’t feeling the same amount of pain he would have if he had been _normally_ healed. 

It’s his mind messing with him. It wouldn’t be the first time, honestly; he knows these dreams like the back of his father’s hand. They’d happened all the time as a child, just with a different scenario—for years, it had been walking into the school building late, even if he had run, even if he had left the house early. Every dream, he’d walk in, and the principal would be waiting for him. Every dream, he’d go, dazed and with stones in his stomach, into the office as the principal dialed his Dad and told him _your son has been missing school._

Every dream, he’d feel his wrist burn as his father twisted it in between the circle of his fingers, and the gravel of his driveway would cut his bare feet— _why wasn’t he wearing shoes?_ —as he was dragged to the front porch. And every time, right as his father took his belt off and snicked it through the worn loops of his jeans, right as he raised it to the sky like an offering to the god that had decided Eliot Waugh was never going to be anything other than a broken boy biting back a yell—

Every time, he’d wake up.

He knows the psychology—something, something, something about trauma, blah blah blah. It’s not nearly enough that his organs had almost leaked out of his side, but now he has to be caught in this endless maze, looping every time he’s supposed to _rest._

It’s no wonder he’s been hallucinating since he woke up from near death.

That’s what the voice is—a hallucination. And a bad one at that. Not at _all_ accurate to the character. Poorly written. Honestly, if he thought about it long enough, he was offended that his brain had come up with a hallucination _this_ horribly put together—he was far more of a creative genius than _this._

Thinking _that_ had pissed the hallucination off.

He’s here, again. The metal of the elevator is way too shiny—do they have janitors in the Underworld? It wouldn’t surprise him, but still, that must _suck_ Ember’s balls. _Sorry, you’re dead, but would you mind Windexing these windows for me?_

The floors drop slowly, and Eliot feels the panic in his chest. There’s always a point in these dreams where it feels so _real,_ where even dream-him is saying, _Is this a dream? It’s not a dream this time, is it?_ Like he’s not going to wake up as soon as—

The door opens. The white light blinds him.

“Eliot,” Quentin breathes. He sucks in a breath, ready to say whatever it is dream-him has to say, when suddenly—

“No,” Eliot says, his voice broken. “No, no, _don’t,_ ” as the dream starts to slip away, and Quentin reaches for him, puts his hand on his wrist, and pulls him back in.

“Stay with me for two seconds,” Quentin says, begs, even as Eliot feels his spirit being tugged back toward his body, “stay _with_ me, you fucker, this is the only time you ever _listen_ to me—I’m real, I’m here, Eliot—”

“Motherfucker!” Eliot gasps, the pain shooting up his side and through his neck as he sits up, hands clutching at the blankets, sweat dripping from his brow. The silk robe he’s sleeping in is tangled around his waist, slipping off his shoulders, and when he opens his eyes, Alice is blushing and looking away.

Alice. Huh. New development, that—Alice hasn’t been anywhere except for her mom’s house this past week and a half, and now she’s the wake-up committee?

“Did Margo die or something?” he gasps, his throat dry. Alice winces and balls her fists in the shirt she’s wearing, which Eliot dimly notices is _Quentin’s,_ and he gulps down nails. “Right, sorry, too soon for death jokes, I suppose.”

“Can you stop being a dick for a second?” she snaps, scrunching up her nose. Her hair isn’t as severe as it normally is, mussed up and a bit—are those waves he sees before him?

“Your natural hair texture isn’t Avril Lavigne?”

“Oh my God,” Alice huffs, shifting. And… right. Okay.

“Sorry,” he says, soft. “I—I wasn’t having the best dream. And I wasn’t expecting to see you. And I’m in pain. Hi, Alice.”

She sniffs. “Hi, Eliot.” Her eyebrow twitches as she looks him over. There are bags under her eyes deeper than the ones under Eliot’s, and that’s saying something, because he’s lugging some serious Prada. He assumes as much, at least—he hasn’t had the balls to check his reflection in a record twenty-four hours, so who knows what his face could be doing at this moment.

“It’s, uh. Good to see you.”

“Is that a question?”

Eliot sighs and leans his head back. “I just didn’t expect you. I know you got us all cornered on the, uh, grieving front.”

She twitches again, her knuckles going a bit whiter in her (his) shirt before relaxing a bit, smoothing it down. “That’s not true,” she says, but she’s not a good actress. “He was all of ours.”

Eliot nods, because there’s not much else he can say to that. What _would_ he say? She has no idea—none of them do—and now wasn’t exactly the best time or place to say, “Hey, kids, your dead dad and I got it on like Donkey Kong for fifty goddamn years in Fillory and even though Margo got the time key from Jane Chatwin’s dead body and reset the whole thing, we remembered, but couldn’t do anything about it and anyway, I was in love with Quentin, too, how’s _that_ for an axe wound?”

She presses on. “I heard you were trying to, um, figure out arrangements.”

“I don’t know much about funerals,” Eliot says. “But I figured, you know—maybe if we could get him a memorial beside his dad…”

“How much do those things even cost?” Alice asks, and for a second she’s not a grieving widow, but the same uptight little snot that had the gall to drink a Long Island Iced Tea in front of him, looking at him with the eyes that said _I know so much more than you do and it’ll eat you alive._

Eliot waves a hand. “Is money even a thing when you’re a Magician?”

Alice laughs—well, snorts like a sorority girl trying coke for the first time—and shakes her head. “You don’t have to do this by yourself,” she says, and it’s followed with a clipped, “so _don’t._ ”

 _She’s right, Eliot._ He winces, shaking his head. _She is. Listen to her, El, if you won’t listen to me—_

“You okay?”

He hadn’t realized his eyes were closed, and Eliot blinks into awareness again. “Yeah,” he lies, as easy as singing. “Just headaches. Lipson has really got this healing shit down to a cruel, cruel science.”

Alice’s smile is tight. “We’re just grateful to have you here.”

“Yeah,” Eliot snorts. “Two dead bodies aren’t better than one, I suppose.”

Alice actually _laughs_ at that, a surprised thing, and it fades into a pained little noise as she reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear.

“Just…” she starts, then blinks, resets herself, takes a deep breath. “I just want to say I’m all in too. I know I haven’t been around. But Quentin was my…”

There’s broken glass in his throat as he says, “I know.”

“And you have friends here,” Alice says. “Like me.”

Eliot has to snort at that and raise an eyebrow. “Alice, we’ve never—”

She shakes her head, her eyes cold as she looks at him. “I would not have been okay with losing you,” she says, as plain as day. Right. Okay, then. Eliot nods, accepting that with as much grace as he can, even as his head pounds.

“All right,” he acquiesces, palms up in surrender. “Well, being my friend right now means putting up with my ill-timed jokes and pretending I’m not stuck in the magical equivalent of a Vietnam vet’s body.”

Alice nods, tight-lipped. “And being my friend right now means letting me help.”

“Deal,” Eliot says. He leans back against the stack of pillows behind him, staring up at the ceiling fan as it turns and turns and turns. “Now can you get Margo in here? I need a drink.”

* * *

Kady’s penthouse has a free-standing tub that’s deep and long enough for _Eliot_ to fit into, so he can only assume that Elizabeth Báthory was the prior owner. It’s marble with gold detailing, and if Eliot hadn’t grown to resent the simple act of personal hygiene, he would have drooled over its luxurious curves and details.

As it stands, though, Eliot hates taking a bath just about as much as Cancer Puppy had.

He has to lean on a cane and someone has to be there to hobble his ass into the bathroom, just in case he slips and falls, and as much as he hates the fact that he’s quickly becoming the Life Alert commercial, he doesn’t want another injury on top of everything else the universe has decided to shit on him lately. And then comes the ever-sexy _wound dressing,_ which is just as oozing and gross as it sounds.

The water is scalding enough to turn his skin bright pink, and every time Margo is in there with him, she’s pouring vanilla tobacco scented bath gel into the water and lighting candles and bringing him a glass—not a bottle, because _bottles are for healthy boys_ —of Nebbiolo. It gives him some sense of normalcy for a split second before the pain in his side throbs on contact with the water, and he has to bite down on his tongue and squeeze his eyes shut until it subsides enough for him to raggedly gasp.

This time, Margo reaches out and brushes the hair back from his forehead, sweaty from the exertion of going from the bed to the bath. “Lipson said she’d stop by this weekend,” she says, as if that’s not three days from now. “She has some things for the pain and can potentially speed up the process.”

“Potentially?” he grits, the back of his jaw tight as he finally sinks the rest of the way into the water, his body giving way.

Margo sighs and shakes her head. “Call me when you need me to help you out of here,” she says as she stands up.

“Sure you don’t want to watch my dick get all pruney?”

Margo scrunches up her nose. “Is that what happens? Please tell me that’s not what happens.”

Eliot waves a hand at her, as if to say _wouldn’t you like to know._ “Go, go, feed the children with your beauty.”

She rolls her eyes and kisses his forehead before slipping out the door.

Most of the time, Eliot’s too tired to really pay attention to it. He feels like he’s floating somewhere outside his body, and time slips away from him, minutes lasting years and hours lasting seconds. Whenever his brain starts to wander toward anything—anything at all—from the past six or so months of his life, the record skips. The breaker gets thrown. It’s instant static, fuzzy and grey, and the next time he looks up, he’s holding a glass of wine he doesn’t remember having, and the water’s gone cold.

But the past couple of nights, as the energy slowly starts to come back to him, his physical exhaustion waning bit-by-bit, his mind has taken a little longer to flip to the off position. The triggers now are a lot more defined—they morph into words, and phrases, and little flashes of memory from the fog come clear to the front before he’s able to slam the emergency brake.

Tonight, his mind is already swirling long before he hits the water. The whole gang had been there, waiting to come into his bedroom and talk about plans, strategy. Alice had done her homework, and Twenty-Three had chimed in with some weird personal backstory about what they did for the kids in his timeline, and Julia had stared out the window with that same hollow look that had been on her face ever since he woke up.

So he really needed the drink. At least Margo had a heavy pour and a generous idea of what a _glass of wine_ looked like.

He can still hear them in the background of the apartment as he reaches for the soap to start the down and dirty part of his bath time. It’s like clockwork, scrubbing every inch of his skin until it turns another shade of pink, soaking off the time he’s spent in the bed. He knows Margo magics the sheets clean every day, but still, he’s pretty sure he’s lying in his own filth 90 percent of the time.

And then there’s his fucking wound. He should name it, honestly, at this point. It’s going to be with him for the foreseeable future, and if it’s not paying rent, he might as well have something to call it when it once again thwarts another attempt at jerking off.

Somewhere in-between mourning the fact that it’s been over six months since he’s had an orgasm and trying to decide whether or not Humphrey is too pretentious to name the oozing line marring his hip, it sneaks up on him.

There’s this train wreck of a feeling that sometimes slams into his heart. It starts with Margo in the distance, telling Julia, “We’re all doing our best, here,” and it ends up with his brain screaming at his fingers to hold on to the stem of the wine glass so that it doesn’t shatter on the tile floor.

It goes like this: a creeping symphony that swells up underneath his ribs and presses his lungs against bone, makes him feel like his body is a cage too small for his wild pain. He thinks of what it was like, being stuck in his own head as he watched a monster in the driver’s seat, and wonders if that was almost better. He shouldn’t feel so far away now.

But he does—one minute he’s wondering if he should add more hot water to the bath, and the next he’s staring into a boy’s eyes in the throne room of Whitespire, watching himself from a distance ruin the only thing that could have saved his life. Could have saved _his_ life.

If Quentin had known, then—If he had just _known_ that Eliot was a coward, but wanted to try—If Eliot had just been able to find the words—If Quentin had gone on that boat quest knowing he was loved so desperately, if he hadn’t listened to his shadow—If he hadn’t decided to lead himself to Blackspire like a lamb to the slaughter—If he knew that Eliot loved him, maybe he wouldn’t have—If Eliot had just told him, and there hadn’t been a bullet, and they had just saved magic together—If Eliot had just told him, if Quentin had known, if there had never been a broken and terrible fragment of God crawling into Eliot’s body like a crab finding its shell—If Eliot had just—

What would it have been like? Would he still be here, staring at the ceiling as Julia says, “I’m sorry I didn’t lose a _boyfriend,_ Alice”? And would he still hear that voice in his head, the one that sounds _too_ much like Quentin when it says:

_It wasn’t your fault._

What was he supposed to do with a ghost that had his heartbeat?

 _Eliot, please, listen to me,_ the voice pleads, so _loud_ now that Eliot can’t connect his mind with his body. He tries to shake it off, but there’s nothing to be done about the way Quentin’s voice cracks when it asks, _Do you mean that? That you—if you had just—do you mean—_

“Fuck off,” he gasps when he finally gets feeling back in his arms. He sets the wine glass down and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fuck off, we’ve been over this.”

_What are you talking about? We—are you actually talking to me?_

“No,” Eliot says, because he’s not going to talk to a hallucination. In fact, he’ll say as much. “I’m not going to talk to a hallucination.”

There’s blissful quiet for a few seconds before:

_If I’m a hallucination, how would not talking to me help?_

God, of course the hallucination of his dead best friend’s voice has a sense of humor. At least someone does.

* * *

“I think I have a brain tumor,” he says when Margo comes in a half hour later. “Remember that storyline with Izzie in Grey’s Anatomy?”

“Sexy dead Jeffrey Dean Morgan.” She nods, walking over to the tub with a couple of towels, the gauze ready to redress his wound on the counter, a chair positioned for him to sit on by the sink. “Come on, you’ve been pruning long enough and I’m tired of fighting with the kids.”

“Yeah, sexy dead Jeffrey Dean Morgan,” he confirms as he reaches between his legs to unplug the drain. “I’m saying, I think I’m having the auditory equivalent of ghost sex.”

Margo raises an eyebrow. “Okay, I’m going to need you to explain that to me.”

“Well, it’s not sexy, that’s for damn sure. In fact, it’s kind of fatally vanilla. It might be funny if it weren’t so _boring_ —”

“Eliot,” Margo says, firm. She unfolds a towel and holds it open.

But Eliot doesn’t get out of the tub. Instead, as the water slurps and swirls down the drain, he stares blankly up at the middle distance and wonders if he’s about to admit something that could be a huge mistake.

But hey. He’s no stranger to huge mistakes.

“I’ve been hearing voices,” he says, his voice calculated, cool as a cucumber. “Specifically one voice. In particular.”

The silence between them grows louder as Margo shifts from one hip to the other. She takes a deep breath and holds it in, like she knows what she wants to say, but is waiting for Eliot to take the final step off the cliff. He looks up and mentally takes her hand. Here we go.

“Quentin’s,” he confirms in the stillness that this moment has gave way to. “Quentin is Jeffrey Dean Morganing me.”

Margo exhales. It leaks out of her like air from an overfilled tire, and she clutches the towel a little bit tighter. “Oh, baby,” she says, before swallowing and fixing her fierce eyes on him. “Let’s not get our panties in a twist just yet. We all go through grief differently. I’m actually surprised that Alice isn’t having actual ghost sex with him.”

“We don’t know that she isn’t,” Eliot says, trying to find his footing back in their normal banter as he rises from the tub on shaky legs.

“Oh, we absolutely do. Do you think she would be this uptight if she was getting dicked down Denny style?”

“Yes.” Eliot laughs. “She was absolutely still this uptight when her and Quentin were bumping uglies.”

“True,” Margo says. She steps forward and wraps the towel around his shoulders, and he pulls it around him as he finally steps out onto the tile. He makes the long journey from the tub to the chair, sits down and wraps the towel around his hips so Margo can grab the salve for him.

He dips his finger into the waxy substance and feels it heat up and turn fluid on his skin, works it slowly into the puckered, red and angry flesh.

“I’m just saying,” Margo says from where she’s leaning on the sink. “I mean, if you died, wouldn’t you be pissed if I wasn’t hearing your voice?”

“You hear my voice all the time and I’m _not_ dead,” he counters. “Because I’m your guiding light, baby.”

“Leading me not into temptation, but steadily toward complete acceptance of my most hedonistic self,” she teases. Her voice still sounds concerned, though, like she’s waiting for a moment to turn this into a Serious Conversation.

“And delivering you from the evils of monotony,” he says. His skin is hot all over from the pain oozing from his side, tight, sweat breaking out over his brow again. This is, by far, the worst part of his day—applying the healing salve over Hugh (no, that didn’t quite work, either) and feeling it eating away at the decaying flesh. Lipson says that daily application will ensure he heals faster _and_ be without a scar, but he’s not sure if she was telling the truth, or just said that to get him out of her hospital bed.

Margo takes the gauze and dips down onto her knees, slicing a long strip off with a quick and clean tut. “Hot,” Eliot praises.

“So,” she continues, pressing the dressing into the warm skin to keep it moist with the salve, “tell me. What is he saying?”

Eliot shakes his head. “Nothing of use, honestly. It’s mostly just him harping on me.”

_I’m not harping on you! I’m trying to get you to listen—_

“Just. On and on,” Eliot continues, eyebrows pinching together. “It’s like you when you get the worst of your period. No offense, Mama.”

Margo sighs and looks up at him with a half-smile. “None taken. For the moment. But you’re on thin ice.”

With the gauze firmly wrapped around his hip, he grabs his briefs from where she’s laid them neatly on the sink and pulls them on, standing with a wince. He has to take care to make sure the waistband is rolled down a bit, just so it’s not sitting right on top of the wound, though he knows it won’t last. He grabs the red silk robe hanging from the hook beside the mirror and wraps it around himself.

“I just don’t know why it’s _his_ voice,” Eliot mutters. “When I was—when the Monster was—”

Does he even want to open this particular cosmically fucked can of worms right now? With the way Margo is looking at him, he simultaneously wants to tell her everything and never speak again.

Eliot’s never been brave. That’s why they’re here in the first place. But they’re already here, and the universe is hellbent on taking everything from him, piece by piece, until all Eliot’s left holding is his tattered pride bleeding out in his palms.

Eliot’s never been brave, and it’s damn well not time to start now.

“I just,” he continues with a wave, grabbing his cane, “you know. I’ve never felt this crazy, even when I was trapped in the back seat of a nearly indestructible, Chuck E. Cheese obsessed nightmare.”

“Well, honey,” Margo says as he wraps an arm around her shoulders. “I _know_ that’s not true. I saw you first year.”

“We do not speak his name.”

“Sure don’t,” she agrees easily.

And that’s good enough, for now. They can walk back to the bedroom with light banter, and she can bring him a peanut butter sandwich and a cookie, and he can drift right off to sleep. She doesn’t need to know what happened when he was trapped in there. He doesn’t need her to know—doesn’t need that look of pity that everyone gives him when they figure out just how much of a broken thing he is, stitched together at the edges with barbed wire from the fences he was supposed to be tied to and left for dead.

They can just go to sleep, like they do every night, and pray for new dreams.

That’s what he’s going to do, at least. And it will have to be good enough.

* * *

This time, when the elevator door opens—because variety is the spice of life, or something—Quentin’s not standing there with moon eyes ready to breathe out his name like a prayer. Rather, his arms are crossed, and he’s _waiting,_ and the blinding light has barely faded before Eliot is being pulled forward by his shirt.

“You,” Quentin gasps, “stay _here._ ”

“Um,” he manages. “I—I’m dreaming.”

“You’re damn right you are. It’s the only way I can get through to you—Eliot, I’m _here._ ”

Eliot reaches up and puts his hands on Quentin’s wrists, trying to gently pry himself out of Dream Quentin’s hold, which is surprisingly strong. “No, I get that. I can see you. You’re here like, every night. You’ve gotta start wearing a costume or singing songs or something if I’m going to be having the same dream. A boy’s got to have some sort of entertainment.”

Quentin gapes at him, a fish opening and closing its mouth, before he tugs Eliot even further forward, as if it’s going to keep him in place. To be fair, this is the longest the dream has ever lasted—Eliot has no idea how he spends over 12 hours a night just descending an elevator shaft only for Quentin to say his name, but brains are weird that way.

“No, Eliot,” Quentin says again. “I’m _here._ ”

“Brains are weird,” he affirms aloud. “Can you say anything else, or is this like Ghost Denny again? You know, when he had to tell Izzie she had a brain tumor and he kept saying—what did he keep saying? Are you the part of my subconscious that knows Grey’s Anatomy?”

“I’ve never watched Grey’s—what the fuck,” Quentin says, those dimples coming up even as he’s frowning and tugging on Eliot’s shirt, as if there’s some sort of button in the fabric or something that will give him a prize if he tugs hard enough. “Eliot, listen. Listen to me. I swear to God, if we have to do this every night in order for you to—”

“Oh, Quentin, now we’re talking. _Now_ we’re getting somewhere—”

“I’m alive,” Quentin says with one final tug. “Eliot, I’m alive.”

Well, that’s just unnecessarily mean.

“Right,” he says, reaching up and patting Dream Quentin on the head. “You are, in my dreams. I get it. Is this supposed to be some sort of like—I don’t know. Are we in an after school special?”

“ _What?_ ”

“Those you love will always live on in your hearts, or something.”

“No, El—”

“Or,” Eliot barrels on, trying to see if he throws the lesson out into the universe, it’ll hear him and leave him alone and let him dream of getting blown by Troye Sivan again, “I can always visit Quentin in my dreams. Or maybe he lives on in my dreams? Am I close?”

“Eliot!” Quentin says, and his voice is getting more distant. Shit. Eliot must be waking up.

“Wait. Maybe you’re visiting me in my dreams to say goodbye? Is that it? Is this some weird Underworld test? Well, if you need my permission to move on, you’re way too focused on my validation, baby boy. But fine—Quentin, I hereby grant you permission—”

With a _yank_ , Quentin comes into high definition focus, almost as if this wasn’t a dream, as if he was standing right in front of Eliot with cheeks pink and eyes wild. “Motherfucker,” he gasps, like he’s running out of breath, running out of time, “I’m alive in here.”

When Eliot wakes, he’s covered in sweat. The clock reads 2 AM, and a car alarm outside is blaring into the night, a headache inducing siren song, beep, beep, beep.

* * *

Somehow, the dream doesn’t happen again.

The next time Eliot wakes up, it’s from blissful nothingness. His head is still pounding like it had been eight hours ago, and there’s a part of him that feels numb from it. Quentin’s gone, then. That must have actually done it.

 _I’m alive in here_ rings through his head, as he sits up. Margo—or Kady, he doesn’t give her enough credit—has set some water on the bedside table along with his daily dose of meds. Well, morning dose. He gets to be on a cocktail now that rivals what he would be taking recreationally if his body wasn’t, you know, post-gaping axe wound. He shakes the little circles and ovals into his palm and slams them back, gulping down the room temperature water gratefully, before lying back to look at the ceiling.

_I’m alive in here. I’m alive in here. I’m alive in here._

It’s an echo, now—faint, distant, not quite the same voice he’s been hearing for over a week, but still not entirely gone. It’s just a loop, like a summer radio station playing the same song three times in an hour. Thankfully, he’s able to push it to the back of his head as he drifts in and out of sleep for the next few hours.

It’s truly incredible, how much his injury has taken out of him. He supposes he should be grateful for still having things like a large intestine and a stomach. Mostly, he wonders when he’s going to be able to move from the bed to the living room without feeling like he’s run a marathon. _Lipson’s coming this weekend,_ Margo had said. So. Maybe then.

Or maybe not.

Maybe Eliot will have to live with this pain for years. Maybe he’ll never be the same, and have to walk with a cane the rest of his life, and take pain pills just to get through the day. Maybe he’ll never stop sleeping more than twelve hours every night, and the scar will always be there to remind him of the time he lost everything to one single bullet.

He should be grateful. He shouldn’t have survived.

Fifteen minutes, Margo had told him when he came back. There had been fifteen minutes of his life—or, well, hah—where his heart had stopped. It was enough time for her to have cried her eyes out, and messed up her hair, and threatened to tear down Brakebills herself. But after fifteen minutes, Eliot Waugh’s heart had decided it was done resting.

He had been dead for fifteen minutes. Lucky bastard.

That had been before Alice had stumbled into the room, white as a sheet and unable to speak.. That had been before the combination of pain from Lipson’s blood-drenched hands still burning his flesh and the word, “Quentin—” had caused him to pass out.

When he woke again, Margo had been quiet. The moon had been up, the machines beeping at a lower volume.

“He didn’t come back, did he?” he had managed to croak. The first words out of his mouth in six months. His tongue hadn’t felt like his own. His mouth had felt like a puppet’s, his voice distant, like it was coming out of a stereo in another room.

Like he said. Lucky bastard.

It was a weird thing, being back in his body. It ached all over—and not just from the wound. It was like having his soul in it stretched it from the inside. Everything felt like it was raw, brand new on his skin. Wind was too forceful, tastes explosive. After months of not being able to feel anything other than emotion, physical sensation was something Eliot could overdose on if he wasn’t too careful.

Which made the whole “gaping axe wound named Harry” thing (still not it—what was the obsession with H names?) even more of a problem.

At the very least, Eliot’s magic hasn’t left him. He feels it curled against his side like a familiar, leaking from every pore. Summoning his cane without even lifting his hand is as easy as blinking. It makes him feel more like a person, even if the way he has to limp to the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal makes him feel like less of one.

Kady’s there, laptop open, typing away when she looks up at him. “Hey,” she says, nodding curtly. “You want me to grab you anything?”

“It’ll make me feel less like a damsel if I try to do it,” Eliot says. “But then again, I don’t mind feeling like a damsel sometimes.”

“Sit down,” she says, motioning to the seat next to her at the island as she rises to her feet. “What do you want?”

“Cereal. Honestly, I can probably…” He trails off as he stares at the cabinet creaking open, as if waving its hand to him.

“No, Mary Poppins. You’re in my place and you don’t get to levitate my Corn Puffs.”

Eliot can’t help but laugh and waggle his eyebrows. “Oh, baby, I’ll levitate your Corn Puffs any time.”

Kady snorts, which Eliot knows is practically hysterical laughter for her. He’s still amazed that she’s keeping this place, even more grateful that she’s somehow okay with him staying here. They’ve never been that close, he knows, but he’s always had respect for her. She carries the whole _edgy and emotionally distant_ torch fairly well.

“Margo said she’d be back later in the afternoon,” Kady mentions.

“Is she bringing Josh?”

“Probably?” She shrugs and pours milk into the bowl. “Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone showed up with her. I guess this is now the club hangout.”

“You can’t tell me you’d want to be cooped up in this place alone.”

“I would prefer to be alone in general,” she counters with a twitch of her eyebrow. “That would be nice.”

“Besides,” he presses on, “it’s…”

Nice. To have everyone together. To be with his friends again. To see them after six months of touching them through what felt like a thick wall of glass.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “I get it.”

He nods, making grabby hands for the cereal bowl. His appetite has been hit or miss, so he has to ride when his stomach decides to be happy with him. He shovels spoonful after spoonful of Corn Puffs into his mouth, each bite cloyingly sugary-sweet.

“You know,” she says, leaning on the counter. “When you were… Murder Eliot,” she offers as an alternate to The Monster, which he’s gotten tired of hearing by now, “you fucking loved sweets.”

“Really?” Eliot asks. “No wonder. I thought it was just swelling. Turns out, I have more of a tum.”

“Please,” she says with an eye roll. “But you did love a good Frappuccino.”

“Well, it is _my_ body we’re talking about. I would hope it would still have taste even without me behind the steering wheel.”

Just talking about it makes his stomach sick. He had heard from Margo about his body’s penchant for tequila and greasy foods and staying up past 4 AM just for the hell of it. “Quentin saw the worst of it,” she had said with a shrug. “He was—he was with you for most of it. I—”

“Was off banging wereJosh.”

He hadn’t been entirely wrong.

The thing that sucks, though, is he can’t say that it isn’t him. Sure, the murder and the sociopathic behavior and the weird childlike complex The Monster had had—that hadn’t been him, that had been Murder Eliot. But it was a lot to know that his body still had an inclination towards self-destruction, even when he wasn’t flying the plane. That there was some innate part of him that craved drunkenly stumbling into bedrooms with his arm around Quentin’s shoulder, or binging himself sick on sweets, or smoking until his throat burned, or lighting fire with his fingers just to feel the fucking warmth.

Well, not that The Monster had done _that_. And it had been missing the key component of _fucking away the emotion._ But it had pretty much cleared the board with the rest of Eliot’s fucked up haberdashery of bad habits. Bingo, and all that.

Kady finishes pouring her own coffee and sits back down at her laptop. “We’re still figuring out this whole ‘memorial’ thing. Did you know that half the people working in the office that issues death certificates are Magicians? Turns out, it’s a lot easier to get a death certificate without a body than you think.”

“Good to know.”

“How are you holding up?”

Eliot pauses in raising the spoon to his mouth, eyebrow quirked. “Are you really trying to talk feelings with me right now?”

Kady shrugs. Her eyes are firmly fixed on her laptop screen, her fingers working like she’s typing to fill the silence. “I don’t want to go to group therapy or anything,” she says.

“God, no.”

“Though we probably need it,” she adds, scrolling quickly on the touchpad. “But. I don’t know. You’re the one who almost got chopped in half.”

“You make it sound so sexy.” Eliot waves his hand and sets the spoon back in the bowl. “It is what it is. Some of us get to leave our body for six months only to come back with its insides almost on its out, some of us have bad days at work. Who am I to say my lot is worse than anyone else’s?”

With that, he stands. He’s only eaten a quarter of a bowl, but suddenly he’s not hungry anymore. “Thank you,” he says with a nod. “I’ll do some more research, too. We should do something. We should…”

What, throw a funeral? Have a wake? Sit around a fire and sing some sort of stupid song? Everything he could possibly say dies on his tongue, and Kady looks at him with that same steady gaze that gives way to no emotion.

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s the problem.”

Eliot waves his hand. “We’ll think of something. He deserves… Something.”

_I’m alive in here. I’m alive in here. I’m alive in here._

Christ.

“And I deserve a goddamn drink,” he finishes, gripping his cane. “I’m going to go waste away now. Sexily, of course.”

Kady nods. “Get your rest,” she says before turning back back to the laptop. “I’ll have Margo wake you up when she gets in.”

Eliot wants to tell her to not bother. He just wants to sleep for the next couple years; at the very least, until they get a new president. But life has to go on, within him and without Quentin.

* * *

“Hope you don’t mind, I'm going to take up the entire couch for this little soiree,” Eliot says as he lies down, head in Margo’s lap. “But also, I don’t really care.”

“You get injured privileges,” Josh says from the kitchen.

“Any way you have a muffin recipe for an axe wound?”

“You really need to give that thing a name,” Josh replies, pulling out a pan from underneath the oven, which. Okay. Maybe Josh does have a recipe for a gaping axe wound.

As the others talk in the background, Margo cards her fingers through his hair, which has never been in a worse state. He hasn’t taken the time to deep condition his curls or wrap his hair in silk in weeks, and lord knows The Monster hadn’t thought to do any of that. His hair is uncomfortably long, too, but he trusts none of them—not even Margo, sorry—to get his cut right, and he’s not going to crawl his way to Midtown right now. He has some dignity left.

“Are you still…?” She trails off, twisting a lock of hair around one finger.

“No,” Eliot says. _I’m alive in here._ “Not really. I think he got tired of hearing my internal monologue.”

“Who?” Julia pipes up. She’s carrying a mug of tea, and sits beside Alice on the floor.

“God,” Eliot replies easily, because that’s the damn truth. If there was a God out there that heard everything, he would’ve turned off Eliot Waugh Radio years ago, probably around the same time Eliot discovered the joys of Carly Rae Jepsen.

Julia snorts and takes a sip. They’re all here, standing and sitting around the couch in a semicircle. Kady is sprawled out on the gold chair, Penny Twenty-Three is leaning against a column, Julia and Alice on the floor, Josh fiddling around in the kitchen while humming to himself. And he’s here, his head in his best friend’s lap, and there’s a moment when he thinks, _well, that’s everyone._

And it fucking hurts.

_I’m alive in here. I’m alive in here._

“Okay, so,” Alice starts, shuffling papers in her hands. “I took the liberty of printing out five headstones, and I got in contact with the cemetery his father is buried in, and they said we could set it up at the plot next to his? Which I think is a good idea.”

Eliot tenses immediately. He hadn’t realized.

“Oh,” Margo says, her voice breaking a bit. “Yeah, honey, he died when you were…”

Alice blinks, owlish and confused, before she looks away. “Right. Yes. You missed a lot.”

“No shit,” Kady says to her fingernails, which she’s taken to inspecting. “So show us the pictures.”

Alice nods, straightening the papers before passing them to Julia, who just immediately passes them along.

“I don’t care,” Julia says, hugging herself for a moment before picking her tea up. “I don’t—it doesn’t matter. It’s not him. He won’t be there.”

“We still want it to look nice,” Twenty-Three says, which is something Forty never would have said, and God, it’s just _weird._ “You’re going to want to visit it someday.”

Julia shakes her head again. “It’s not _him,_ ” she says, turning to look at him over her shoulder.

“All right,” Kady says, taking the photos and looking through theml. “It doesn’t matter. I’ve already contacted the state and started the process of getting his official certificate and registering him as dead.”

“Jesus, Kady.”

“What? What else am I supposed to do? We’re all talking about getting him a tombstone, I don’t know what the problem is with—”

_I’m alive in here. Eliot. Eliot._

Above him, Margo speaks. “She’s not trying to be insensitive, Julia. She’s being practical. We can’t keep pretending that he’s not dead by just not saying it. He’s dead. Dead.”

“Can you stop?” Alice’s voice this time. Eliot realizes, a bit too late, that his eyes have been closed, and he opens them just as:

_Eliot. I’m not—I’m not dead. I’m alive in here. You have to believe me._

“I get that he’s—he’s gone,” Alice says, sniffing and smoothing out the hem of her shirt—still his shirt.

“So what’s the problem with a certificate that says the same thing?” Kady retorts.

“Who’s going to break it to his mother?” Josh pipes up from the kitchen, which is by far the weirdest part of the conversation thus far. “I mean, if I died, I would hope you’d call Mrs. Hoberman fairly quickly. She’d have to make sure like, so many family members knew I wouldn’t be making Seder.”

_Don’t tell her. Eliot. Don’t let them tell her._

“Would Quentin even want his mother to know?” Eliot says. “Didn’t he have a strained relationship with her?”

Julia sighs. That same hollow look is back on her face, the one that makes her look like she’s watching the horizon out at sea instead of at the grain of the hardwood floors. “I could tell her. She knows me. She… she would want to know.”

_Don’t tell her._

“We could probably get this done within the week. Eliot, would you feel up to making the trip?” Alice asks.

_Eliot, no—how do I—Jesus, how am I going to get you to listen?_

“I can always make it later on,” Eliot croaks. His throat is so, so dry, and his head is pounding, and wasn’t this hallucination supposed to be _over with_ by now? Maybe he did need therapy. Maybe he needed to be institutionalized, for all he knew. There had to be some sort of Magician-run insane asylum out there.

Alice nods, tilting her head to the side. “He’d understand,” she says softly. Eliot can tell she’s trying to comfort him, to let him know that Quentin wouldn’t mind if he couldn’t hobble his way over to his fake grave. It’s sweet.

It falls a bit short.

 _Alice,_ his head suddenly screams. _Alice! Eliot, Alice!_

Eliot wants to answer, “Yes, Quentin, I know that’s Alice,” but he’s not quite ready to go to that insane asylum just yet.

The voices of the others start to blend together. Eliot can feel himself slipping into the state where his body feels miles away. One moment he’s on the couch with Margo’s hand in his hair, the next he’s floating two inches above himself, the air around him tight and his body feeling infinitely smaller than it is.

The voice grows louder as his view of the ceiling goes blurry.

_Eliot, stay with me._

_I’m right here,_ Eliot wants to say. _I’m here, and I’m in my body, and you can’t take it over. Not again._

Maybe this is The Monster, Eliot realizes with ice cold horror. Maybe they hadn’t killed all of it. Maybe it’s stitched into his side, just above his hip, aching to get out. Maybe that’s the burning pain he feels constantly, always at a 6 or 7—The Monster trying to crawl its way out of Eliot’s body, but trapped.

_No, Eliot. Please. It’s me—I can prove it._

_How,_ Eliot wonders, before he remembers. Right, no talking to the hallucination.

_Alice. I can prove it._

Somewhere far away, Josh is asking the group if they would like something to drink. Margo asks him if he wants some water, and he doesn’t know how his body manages to nod. He doesn’t feel it happen. How does he not feel it happen?

_Call her Vix._

_That proves nothing,_ Eliot thinks. He had known about their weird little nicknames for each other the minute they came back from Brakebills South, because they never shut the fuck up about it. Honestly, they had been disgusting for the first two weeks. Eliot hoped that, wherever Quentin was, he knew that.

_I’m right—okay, okay. She has three moles on the back of her neck._

_Sure she does,_ Eliot thinks. And he’s probably seen those—and more—at some point in time.

Josh gives Margo a glass of water and a kiss on the forehead, and Eliot is surprised his body doesn’t puke without him. Bummer. Maybe it doesn’t know what it’s doing without him.

_Fuck, Eliot, I don’t know—I don’t know how to—_

There’s silence, then, sudden and deafening. Eliot hears everyone’s voices through a damp rag—several damp rags, and possibly several pairs of headphones, too. He just wants to be back in his body, even if the pain is terrible. He just wants to feel real again.

Right as he’s about to float back, he hears it. It’s softer, somehow, less sure of itself.

_Ask her about the time she had a sex dream about Margo._

It’s so absurd, so incredibly weird, that it snaps him back into his body _immediately._ Suddenly, Eliot is gasping and sitting up, and the pain in his side doesn’t even register as he turns to Alice, who is staring blankly at the picture of a tombstone that Kady said she liked.

“You had a sex dream about Margo?”

There’s a long pause. Eliot thinks maybe he’s dreaming. That would be just his luck—that his next dream would be some weird funeral planning meeting. He really hopes he’s not stuck in this one.

Twenty-Three is the first to break the silence with a short laugh and a, “Uh, dude, are you… feeling okay?”

Alice is looking at him like he’s grown another set of eyes, her jaw hanging open. And then—because Eliot’s life isn’t already so fucking weird—she looks _angry._

“What the hell, Eliot?” she asks, crossing her arms. “Why would you—how do you even—”

Margo’s suddenly very interested in the conversation. “You—when did this happen?” she asks, a smirk on her face, because Mama loves nothing more than knowing she’s the starring role of someone’s fantasy. Eliot can’t blame her, but his heart is pounding loudly, suddenly, because—

“Oh my god, did you?” he says, the room beginning to spin.

“I—” Alice opens her mouth, shuts it. Does it again. Runs a hand through her hair and tugs a bit. She really does look good without her hair pin straight, he thinks. “Why would you even ask me that?”

Eliot fumbles for the words. He doesn’t know how to explain, _Well, see, the hallucination that I’ve been having since I woke up thinks it’s funny to ruin my life in very specifically cruel ways._

“Um,” he says, licking his lips. “I just remembered—we were talking about, um, Quentin. And how much he would hate all of this.” They had been talking about that, right? “And I just remembered—you know, how much of a dick he could be, and he told me once—”

Alice sniffs, her eyes burning with angry tears. “He _told_ you?”

Kady is watching the two of them with the Kady equivalent of a smile on her face, like this is the best Christmas ever, like she’s the cat who got the canary and the cream all at once. He wants to ask her if this is fun for her, but the world is skidding to a stop, because—

“So you did have a sex dream about me?” Margo prods, because she never knows when to let something go. Eliot feels the blood rush from his head. Quentin had told him that Alice had a sex dream about Margo—not months ago, not before The Monster, but just now. Just now, Quentin had told him.

Quentin had—

“He wasn’t supposed to go and blab it to everyone, Jesus,” Alice mutters, tightening her hold around herself.

Quentin—

_I’m alive in here. I’m alive in here!_

“Quentin’s alive,” Eliot gasps. He feels himself pulling away from his body. “Oh my God. Quentin’s alive.”

Eliot passes out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Penny goes swimming. Josh makes scones. Alice pays for a tombstone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW. wowowowowowow.
> 
> thank you so much for all the INCREDIBLE comments left on this. i've written... 20k? this week? and that's because of you all, and i can't thank you enough. i mean, i started this on my own, but seeing your enthusiasm for this story has definitely kept me on track and motivated and. ahhhhhh.
> 
> i am so happy, and i am so excited to go down this road with you. i've got so many things up my sleeve. we're just beginning, y'all!
> 
> PS: the '6' may be subject to change, but i'm thinking this is going to have five proper chapters and the prologue. we'll see. it's already run ALL THE WAY AWAY FROM ME.
> 
> PPS: snail cappleman, go away

Quentin meets him at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

“Are you—please tell me you’re going to listen to me _now,_ ” he says, shifting from side to side, arms crossed and jaw twitching anxiously. He looks like he’s about to yell out of frustration if Eliot says no.

“No,” Eliot says, just to be a dick.

Quentin opens his mouth, closing it on a smile, laughing as he throws his arms around Eliot’s torso and clings to him like a koala. “Eliot,” he breathes, and it’s different than all the times before—it’s less pleading, less desperate, more like rain putting out a wildfire.

“Hey,” Eliot replies. His throat is tight, tight, tight. “I’m dreaming, right?”

“Something like that?” Quentin coughs, pulling away. He doesn’t go any farther than arm’s length, though, and keeps a hand on Eliot’s bicep, anchoring him there. “I know you’re asleep. Well, your body is asleep. Your mind is here. At least, that’s what I’m assuming? I’m not entirely sure. Um.”

“And you’re here,” Eliot says. “Alive. Somehow. What, exactly, does _alive_ mean?”

Quentin’s lips twitch into a smile, like he can’t help it. “Do you really think this is all that weird, considering what we’ve been through?”

“I’d like to think there’s a possibility for my life to be _somewhat_ normal at some point.”

“Well, uh. I hate to, you know. Hate to be the one to break it to you, El, but that’s not going to be now,” Quentin says. “God, it’s good to—do you know how hard I’ve been trying to just _talk_ to you?”

“I’ve heard you a couple of times, yes.”

“I don’t know how much time we have left.” Quentin barrels on in the same way he always does, like if he doesn’t talk fast enough, there’s no way he can get out all the words. Eliot’s always liked the stuttering, unsure way that Quentin talks, as if his brain can’t form the words fast enough for his mouth. It’s so different from someone like Margo or even Julia; whenever Quentin happens to be witty, it’s a pleasant surprise, and he often doesn’t catch it, too caught up in the heat of the moment. It’s ridiculously endearing, because it’s so sincere. “Um, so—so I think—you know I’m alive now, right?”

“I do,” Eliot says. “I don’t know how I… how I _know_. What alive means. But I do. I believe you.”

Quentin nods. “I’m not a part of your subconscious,” he says. “I have, like, memories and thoughts and feelings of my own. It’s like I’m, um. Not quite trapped? I mean, I keep showing up in the Underworld, but I honestly think that’s your mind’s doing, not mine. I’m not sure why.”

Eliot shrugs. “I thought you were dead.”

“Maybe.” Quentin nods, squeezing his arm. “And I’m not quite sure where I am when you’re awake. I know I can talk to you, but it’s like I’m watching everything through your eyes. Except I can’t move my body. Or, you know, your body. Does that make sense?”

“Quentin, I’ve spent the last half year watching a vengeful murder demon use my hands to kill gods,” Eliot says, and maybe the smile on his face is a bit out of place for the context, but fuck it, Quentin’s _alive._ “I think I’m the only one this might make sense to.”

“Okay, yeah, fair point.” Quentin laughs.

“The thing that I don’t get,” Eliot continues, because who knows how much time they have, “is that you were lost in the Seam. And now you’re… here?”

Quentin shrugs. “It beats me, too. I don’t remember being anywhere else. It doesn’t make sense.”

Eliot nods. “And… and how do we get you… out of here?”

“I have no idea,” Quentin says. “And I don’t—you know, I’m in your head. I don’t exactly have the resources in the outside world you have. Um, I mean, I don’t know how much exploring I can do in here? But I don’t have access to your memories or anything. It’s… I mean, it’s literally like I’m living inside your head.”

“Like Charlton,” Eliot says, and fuck. What does it say about his life that this isn’t a _new_ experience?

“What?”

“Charlton. He was—”

Eliot freezes, feeling the pull of his body start to call him, like a rope tied around his abdomen, dragging him back into reality. “Quentin,” he gasps. “I’m about to—I’m about to wake up.”

“Fuck,” Quentin says, squeezing his bicep. “I—okay. Okay. Just _listen_ to me out there, okay?”

“I’ll do my best,” Eliot promises. “Just—we’ll figure this out, Q, we always do.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says as he gets farther away, his figure growing smokey, blurring the closer and closer Eliot gets to consciousness, “we do.”

* * *

Eliot blinks awake. It’s nighttime, and the apartment is quieter, and he’s somehow back in his bed.

And, of course, Margo is staring him down.

“Okay,” she says as soon as Eliot blinks at her. “You wanna explain to me exactly what the hell happened back there, or do I have to assume you’ve officially lost it?”

Eliot’s throat is dry from sleep—or unconsciousness, he supposes—and he bats helplessly in the direction of the nightstand until she sighs and picks up his water bottle and hands it to him. 

“You really are baby,” she murmurs.

“Are you surprised?” he croaks, sitting up slightly. His side still aches, no better or worse than before.

“No,” she says, waiting for him to take a sip of the water before pressing him again. “What happened?”

“I’m not crazy,” Eliot says, figuring that’s a good place to start. “But I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to make you believe me.”

“You said Quentin—who is very much dead—was _alive._ After you announced to God and everyone that Alice Quinn apparently has sex dreams about me—which, by the way, I’m going to need more detail on. No one really wanted to keep talking about it after _someone_ passed out.”

Eliot reaches for her hand. “I’m calling Trials.”

Margo’s eyes widen. “You haven’t called Trials since you had to convince me that the two guys we were fucking in Rome were actually One Direction members in glamours.”

“Not One Direction,” Eliot gently reminds, because they hadn’t been _that_ famous. “But yes, it’s _that_ serious.”

Margo adjusts, sitting up straighter. “Okay, Eliot. What?”

“And per the rules of Trials,” Eliot continues, “you have to trust me with your life on this one, even if you don’t believe me, even if it sounds like it can’t be true. Promise me.”

Margo nods, licking her lips, her gaze lost in middle distance. When she fixes her eyes on Eliot again, the fire has returned. “All right. I swear on Indiana and dads being shitheads.”

Eliot takes another sip of water before setting the bottle down. “Quentin’s alive. He’s in my mind, somehow, but it’s not a hallucination—the voice I was hearing is him. I know it’s him, because I had no idea about that sex dream before he told me, on the couch, right there.”

God bless Margo. The revelation shakes her for only a second before she sets her jaw, swallowing and nodding like she’s already formulating a game plan. “Okay,” she says after a long moment. “So Quentin’s alive.”

_That’s all you had to do?_

Eliot laughs, sudden, and Margo raises an eyebrow. “Oh, Quentin just says thank you.”

_That’s not what I—I mean, yeah. Thanks, Margo._

“You’re welcome, Q,” Margo says, staring straight at Eliot’s forehead. “And he’s… inside your head.”

Eliot nods. “Okay, look. When I was in The Monster, I was stuck at… basically The Cottage,” he says. This is the most he’s actually described what he went through to Margo—this is actually the most they’ve _talked_ about it, and he feels a twinge of guilt for that, but it’s not like it was a fun story to tell. “It was like I was living inside this world, and I only got to look out every now and then.”

Margo nods, trying to follow along. “Right. So Quentin’s going through the same thing?”

Eliot shrugs. “Not exactly. See, The Monster ate its hosts. There was this guy, Charlton, stuck in there with me—the guy that we shot in Blackspire. The Monster held his soul in this trap along with all the other creatures he had possessed. So it was like… we were in his fucked up little dollhouse.”

Margo crosses her legs and nods, waving to Eliot in the signal he recognizes as _continue, but I’m going to need a cigarette first._ His magic reaches out to the drawer and floats her a lighter and his pack.

“Whereas Quentin… he says he can see out my eyes, but he just can’t control my body. But he still has all his memories and emotions, and he’s able to talk to me, which I wasn’t able to do with The Monster. I don’t think.”

Margo lights the cigarette and takes the first drag, sighing it out while nodding. “Okay. I’m not one hundred on this, but I’m as close as I’m going to get without actually being in your body myself, and the last time we tried that, it didn’t go so well.”

_What?!_

Eliot laughs again, loud and bright. “And he can hear everything you say.”

Margo waggles her fingers at him, winking. “What, Alice never pegged you? Or maybe that’s what she was thinking about in her dream. You got any more deets for that, Coldwater?”

_Jesus Christ. I don’t have to stay and listen, you know. I’ve gotten better at tuning you out._

Eliot shushes her. “You’re offending our boy’s delicate sensibilities.”

“Now I _know_ he’s alive in there,” she says. “Okay, so… I believe you. Even if I don’t get it. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to be able to get the others to believe us. Even if you pull out more proof, we have no way of knowing that you didn’t get that knowledge prior to the Monster. And it’s not exactly like you can show…”

Margo’s head tilts to the side at the same time Eliot feels the gear shift into drive, and they both gasp, “ _Show it._ ”

“Penny,” Eliot says. “Twenty-Three can incept me and see Quentin.”

“How would he know it’s not just a hallucination?”

“We—” Hmm. Eliot deflates a bit, shrugging. “Maybe Quentin knows something about Penny no one else does?”

_Are you kidding?_

“Or maybe… maybe he’ll just be able to sense that it’s Quentin,” Margo offers up. “Look, it’s better than anything else we have.”

Eliot nods, motioning to the empty space beside him, and Margo circles around the bed to crawl in. “I suppose we have to figure out something in order to make for my fiasco this afternoon.”

“Not really.” Margo lies on her back, crossing her hands over her stomach and tossing him a look out of the corner of her eye. “They all thought you were just fucked up on pain meds and seeing things. Granted, I was pretty sure you were, too.”

They lay there in comfortable silence for a minute or two, and Eliot wonders if Margo is dozing before she says, “Hey, can I just—can I use you as a Quentin telephone for a minute?”

Eliot snorts but nods, waving his hand in the air. “My body is yours to use, love of mine.”

Margo smiles and props herself up on her elbow, lying on her side. Eliot’s head lolls onto his shoulder so he can lazily gaze at her. In the low light of the evening, she looks so young and untouched by all this bullshit they’ve been through. She’s the same girl he met almost three years ago, wide-eyed (just like a certain cartoon deer) and pretty and wild.

“Hey,” she says, and it’s… soft. A lot less sure than she normally is. “You can hear me, right?”

_Yes. Tell her I said yes._

“You’re good,” Eliot confirms with a nod. “Should I leave you two alone?” he jokes.

Margo flips him off. “I just want to say I’m sorry.”

Eliot quirks an eyebrow at her, but she makes a _shoo_ motion with her hands.

“I don’t know where you are, besides Eliot’s head,” she starts. “And I know that must not be the most fun place to be hanging out.” Now Eliot _really_ wants to speak up—but she shushes him again. “But we thought you were dead, which means we thought you were in the Underworld, and instead of…”

Eliot watches as the brave face she wears so naturally gives way to guilt, to something deeper and more sacred than courage. “Instead of storming down there and demanding you back myself, I started looking at tombstones.”

“Bambi—”

“And,” she pushes, not wanting to hear Eliot’s comfort, “I was even going to let Alice buy some tacky fucking angel to put on top of yours. We gave up on Penny because of the Library, and even then I was sure we’d bust his shit out once we figured magic out again. But you died, and we just… took it.”

Eliot watches her. Quentin’s voice is quiet inside, and he nods for her to continue.

”We’re all tired of fighting, Q. I’m real fucking tired of it. I’m tired of werewolves, and Fillory, and magic. I want to go back to wondering what bathing suit I’m going to take to Encanto this year. You came into my life and fucked everything up, kid. I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, and exhales. When she opens her eyes again, they’re wild with fire.

“So let’s get you out of there,” she says, smirking. “ _Before_ Alice buys the tombstone.”

* * *

“I went ahead and put in an order for the tombstone,” Alice says. She tucks her hair behind her ear and avoids direct eye contact with Eliot—something she’s been doing since he let her sex dream secret loose to the public, but he didn’t have it in him to be sorry about it.

It’s mid-morning, and he’s just woken up. He doesn’t remember the dream from the night before, which means he probably didn’t have one—he supposes even Quentin’s disembodied consciousness has to rest sometimes. Josh is in the kitchen clanging about, making scones and trying to negotiate with the espresso machine. The rest of the gang is waiting for him to be done so they can carb-up before The Meeting Margo has called.

All except for Alice, who is sitting with a piece of folded paper in her hands, prim, finally wearing a skirt (but still with one of Quentin’s button-ups tucked into the waistline). Her hair is straight, too—she’s beginning to look less like the Ghost of Widows Present and more like herself. And then there’s Julia, sitting on the window seat, shuffling a deck of cards.

She picked up the deck the day after Quentin disappeared into the Seam, but she’s not very good. From what Eliot’s seen, she can barely shuffle. But in quiet moments, he’s seen her try to use magic to do some tricks, and Twenty-Three encourages her sad attempts at sleight of hand with little bouts of applause and kisses to her forehead. Eliot wants to throw the damn thing out the window, but he doesn’t want to injury himself any further, so it stays, the constant shuffling cutting whatever silence fills the room.

“Good,” she says now, the sound of the cards folding into each other punctuating her words. “So that means we can finally stop talking about it.”

Margo shakes her head. She’s propped up where she slept last night next to Eliot, looking radiant with unbrushed hair and without any makeup on. Eliot’s only a little bit mad about it. “Will you both wait until our hungry cohorts come back from the kitchen? I don’t want to have to repeat myself when we make this announcement.”

“No, we’re not pregnant,” Eliot cuts in at the curious look on Alice’s face. “Though it has been a while since I’ve had my period.”

Julia snorts. She’s not really laughed for the past week and a half—he’s not sure any of them have, except for maybe Twenty-Three—but every day she seems a little less distant, a little bit more present in her own body. He knows she doesn’t want to stay a shell forever, but she’s just as bad at putting on a brave face as he is. Every time she sees Alice in one of Quentin’s shirts, Eliot can tell she’s fighting the urge to chain smoke and stare at the ceiling until next spring comes around.

“You know, we’ve been doing a lot of these family meetings lately,” she says. “But we’re going to need to get back to work. Magic still isn’t right—it’s been surging a lot. There are reports of heightened activity in Asia, and parts of Africa, and near the Yukon. Fogg says—”

“There’s too much magic,” Alice cuts in, nodding. “I know. Mom has been saying some of the same stuff. It seems like killing Everett made it… unstable. It’s fine one minute, and then a dam breaks.”

Eliot blinks. It still doesn’t make much sense. When he had woken up, there was magic, and Quentin was gone. Now, Quentin’s stuck in his head, and magic is throwing a temper tantrum, and—

Well, actually, that makes more sense than “magic being fine” and “Quentin’s just dead.” 

Julia nods. “So I was—I was going to head back to Fillory,” she says with a little shrug. “They’ve had magical surges in the past when Ember and Umber would fuck with things, and I just figured maybe there’d be something in Whitespire’s library—”

“I could come with you,” Alice perks up. “I don’t—I don’t think anyone has checked on Fillory since…”

Margo pinches the bridge of her nose. “Josh,” she calls out loudly, “I don’t care if those scones are raw and if the coffee’s just hot water, you better get your ass in here before—”

“Breakfast is served, my lady,” Josh says with a flourish, carrying a pewter tray topped with a mountain of scones and four lattes in ceramic mugs, each with their initials on them—E, A, J, and M. Kady and Twenty-Three follow closely behind carrying their own. Twenty-Three is munching on a chocolate chip scone. Josh goes to Alice and Julia, lets them pick what they want from the pile, then circles around and hands the tray to Margo before announcing, “I’m coming in! Sorry, my man.”

Eliot grunts and shifts over a bit, choosing a lemon poppy seed scone and levitating his coffee over to the nightstand.

“So, what are we here for?” Kady asks, grabbing a chair and kicking her leg over it to straddle it backwards.

“I thought we were talking about Quentin,” Alice says, blinking owlishly. “Arrangements, right? We’re finalizing everything. I brought the receipt for the tombstone. I was thinking we could maybe split it, or maybe if someone wants to pick up the tab for the flowers—”

“We’re talking about Quentin,” Margo says. “But we’re not talking about arrangements. There’s not going to be any need for arrangements.”

Julia sighs, begins to shuffle her cards again. “If you’re going to suggest we do another Underworld break in, it’s impossible. Especially with magic acting up the way it is— _maybe_ if it were stable, but even then, just getting my _shade_ back was a nightmare. And that’s if and only if Quentin hasn’t moved on. If he has, that means we make enemies in the Underworld for nothing.”

“We don’t have to break into the Underworld,” Eliot says. “And he hasn’t moved on. He’s alive.”

Josh hums through a bite of scone. “Man, you really got to tell Lipson to dial back on those meds. Or maybe dial them up. They sound kind of fun. You have any extras?”

Margo jabs her elbow in the side, and Josh groans, throwing his hands up like _what did I do?_ Eliot sits up a bit more, wincing as his skin pulls and stretches—who knew even just sitting up would disturb _everything_ —and fixes his gaze on Alice and Julia. They’re going to be the hardest to convince, and he needs them on his side.

“When The Monster was in my body, I was kept alive inside its head with all its other fucked up cast of hosts,” he explains. “Quentin is alive. He’s in my head. I can hear him. I can see him when I sleep. He’s _alive._ ”

Julia looks blank, and Alice just looks… uncomfortable. “Eliot,” she starts, a layer of pity in her voice, “grief is a weird thing. I’ve been seeing him in dreams, too, and I can swear I hear his voice. And when Charlie died, I heard him all the time. This isn’t—”

“I didn’t know about your sex dream about Margo,” Eliot counters quickly, his skin feeling hot. “Quentin hadn’t told me until five seconds before I said it. He’s _alive,_ Alice.”

Alice just shakes her head, quiet, her lips pursed. _She doesn’t believe you,_ Quentin’s voice comes through, ever fucking helpful.

“Look, you don’t have to believe us,” Margo starts.

“Us?” Josh asks, taking another bite of scone.

“I’m not going to believe you,” Kady pipes up. “We have no proof other than something that Eliot claims he didn’t know until yesterday. Memory’s weird. Brains are weird.”

“But you have to give it a chance,” Margo continues, glaring at Kady. “We’re not asking for you to believe us right now. But we are asking…”

She turns to Twenty-Three, who’s watching with arms crossed. “We’re asking for your help.”

Twenty-Three’s quirks an eyebrow. “ _My_ help?”

“Yes, Penny,” Eliot sighs dramatically. “I’m going to do a strip tease on my mental wards so you can see Quentin is in there, and not just a figment of my imagination. Do you think you can do that?”

Julia looks more interested now, glancing back at Twenty-Three before looking at Eliot again. “You’d let him in your head?”

“Your mental wards are pretty strong, dude,” Twenty-Three adds. “I’ve never been able to breach them. Not that I’ve, you know, tried.”

“Sure,” Eliot says with a wave of his hand. “But yes, you’d be allowed in. And look, if I’m crazy—or crazier than I already know I am—and this is all just a hallucination, you get to report back the good news.”

“But it’d be crazy not to try,” Margo finishes.

_And you’re not crazy, Eliot._

“And Quentin says I’m not crazy,” Eliot adds, “so you all have to be nice to me for housing our temporarily dead best friend slash boyfriend slash life partner slash resident dork.”

_God._

Alice sniffs, casting a nervous look at Julia, then back down at the piece of paper folded in her hands. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” she says. “All we would need is for Eliot to go to sleep without his wards, and Penny would be able to see what’s happening. As long as Eliot’s okay with it…”

Julia just snorts again. “I don’t see the point,” she says, shuffling the cards with a bit more gusto. “But whatever. You want to get incepted, it’s no skin off my back.”

“I feel like you’re taking my line, Wicker,” Kady says with a smirk. “But I’m down to see what happens, so long as you don’t burn down my penthouse in the process.”

Twenty-Three nods, shrugging. “All right, dude, I guess we’re going to do this. Just, you know, don’t try and kill me in there, okay? The last time I was in someone’s dream—”

“No promises,” Eliot purrs. “The last time you were in _my_ dreams, we were having an Alice and Margo moment.”

Alice squeaks and fidgets in her chair as Margo cackles, throwing her head back.

“Oh, dude, I didn’t need to know that—”

“It was amazing, Penny. Truly. Both you and Penny Forty at the same time—If I had a dream camcorder, I’m telling you—”

“Oh my god, stop. I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Why would I ever joke about something as sacred as—”

“I swear to God, if you weren’t injured, I’d come over there and shut you up myself.”

Julia giggles loudly. “Kinky!” she chimes in, and Kady throws her head back in laughter. Even Alice is giggling as Twenty-Three fumbles, throwing his arms up, and maybe Eliot is a crazy motherfucker. But he’s surrounded by some pretty wonderful, crazy motherfuckers, too.

“So let’s do this,” Eliot says. “Tonight. When I go to sleep. I’ll have Margo text you.”

Twenty-Three sighs, finally calming down. “Deal. Yo, don’t ever say I didn’t do anything for you, all right?”

“It’s not for me,” Eliot says with a wave. “It’s for Quentin.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Penny mutters. “Well. That goes for you, too, Quentin,” he says, pointing a finger at Eliot’s forehead.

_Thanks, Penny._

“He says he wants to see us recreate the dream,” Eliot says in a scandalized whisper. “Why, Quentin! I didn’t know you were so—”

“I swear to God, Waugh—”

And with Margo squirming beside him with laughter, Alice grinning ear to ear, and Julia hugging her knees to her chest with the first sign of life in her eyes for days, Eliot finally feels just a little less crazy.

Just a little.

* * *

_Do you think Penny’s going to believe us?_

“You make it seem like we’re co-conspiring on this,” Eliot says to the ceiling. It’s early afternoon, and there’s a slight breeze coming through his window, the smell of the halal cart outside wafting up and making his stomach twist in hunger.

_I mean, like. Technically we are? You’re kind of my partner in this. I am, you know, living inside your head._

“True,” Eliot says. He’s bored out of his mind, levitating a book above his head just because he doesn’t feel like holding it up. He’s read the same paragraph five or six times. It’s some book on psychic principals that Kady has in her stash, either something she stole from Brakebills back in her hedge runner days or something she had gotten for Forty. Either way, it’s boring as hell. The language is archaic, and somehow it’s in the same pretentious tone that every psychic he’s ever met has had, the _I’m better than you because I can read your mind_ attitude that has him constantly rebuilding his mental wards.

_Well, he’s our only hope in getting the others to believe us. Believe me._

“I’m sure it’s going to be fine, Q,” Eliot says, finally giving up and closing the book, floating it to the bedside table. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbing away the beginnings of a headache. He’s not sure if it’s the stress or the fact that there’s another person’s consciousness inside of him, but semantics.

_But, um. Thank you. For finally listening to me._

“You’ve thanked me already,” Eliot reminds.

_I know, but—but I’m still going to keep doing it. I was beginning to think—well. I was afraid you’d never really believe me, and I’d just be… stuck here. No offense._

“None taken.”

_And, um. You’ve been really nice to me, all things considered. I mean, you called me a hallucination and all that, but you—I can tell—I don’t know._

Eliot chuckles at that, rolling his eyes as he goes back to staring at the ceiling. “It’s been nice to hear something other than my own bullshit for a change.”

_Yeah, I. I definitely understand that. I—I just wanted to make sure you don’t think I’m like, spying on you or whatever. I try to tune you out when I can. I know it’s your mind and all, so, you know, I’m trying to give you space._

“You live inside my head, Quentin.”

_Hey, there’s no rules or precedent for this, you know. It’s not like I can ask someone for advice on how to go about living in your best friend’s head._

“Well, you’re doing a pretty good job. Most people would have gone insane by now, I think.”

_No, um. Tell that to whoever happens to be living in my head, then._

“I will when you get out of here,” he promises just as Twenty-Three walks in, raising an eyebrow. “And Penny says hi.”

_I can hear the outside, too, you know._

“Quentin?” Penny asks, and Eliot nods. Penny’s face looks a bit pinched, like if he’s bargaining with whatever gods he prays to for deliverance. “I was just checking in, seeing if you were maybe ready to…” He waves idly to the bed.

“I’m going to assume you mean _take a nap_ , because I’ve already had my fun with innuendos for today,” Eliot yawns, and nods. “And given the fact that my sleep schedule is just _whenever possible_ these days, I could go for one, yes.”

Penny nods, crossing his arms over his chest. “Okay, word.” He looks around the room, like he’s trying to find something to settle his gaze on. “Look, are you sure you’re comfortable with this, man?”

“I’m sure,” Eliot says. Just the thought of sleep makes his body yearn. “There’s no other way to get you to believe me. And as soon as everyone believes me, the sooner we can figure out how to get him out of there. No offense, Q.”

_None taken._

Penny scrunches his nose and sighs. “Right, right. Well, let’s establish some boundaries first. I’m not interested in your dark and dirty thoughts, so just… try and avoid that as best you can, all right?”

Eliot snorts. “I’m not going to purposefully fuck with you, Penny. Not when I’m not awake to fully appreciate the aftermath.”

“I just have to make sure.” Penny frowns. “Going into someone else’s head—it’s a vulnerable thing. You don’t know what you’re going to run into in there.”

“I’ve been having the same dream over and over for the past week and a half. I think it’s the only place where Quentin and I can meet.” Eliot shrugs and waves a hand. “It’s fairly boring, if you ask me.”

_Ha._

“Okay.” Penny nods. “Well, then, the only thing I have left to ask you is to… drop your mental wards. I won’t even attempt at getting in your head until you’re asleep, so I’ll give it about an hour just to make sure. But if there’s any block, any at all, I might not be able to get through and see Quentin.”

Eliot nods, but pauses. “Can—it’s not an issue if we put wards up around the room, right?”

Penny frowns, shrugging. “I don’t see why it would be. What, you afraid Kady’s secretly a psychic?”

“I’ve been mindfucked a little bit too much lately,” Eliot says wearily. “And bodyfucked at the same time. I would prefer the added security.”

“Noted,” Penny says with a nod. “I’ll put up some extra psychic wards, then. You’ll be safe. It’ll just be you and me in there.”

“And Quentin.”

“And Quentin,” Penny says, though he doesn’t sound convinced just yet. “All right, well. I’m going to… leave you to it. Uh. Night, sleep tight?”

“You’re not gonna tuck me in?”

“Yeah, I’m leaving now,” Penny chuckles, pushing off from where he’s leaning against the dresser, waving as he slips out the door. Almost as a second thought, he comes back, nods at Eliot, and then flicks the light switch off, shutting the door behind him.

Eliot can feel the crackle of magic that comes a moment later, can practically hear Penny begin the psychic wards, and it puts his mind at ease. Margo had warded the shit out of his room the second he’d gotten back from Lipson’s—in her words, “We don’t need any nasty motherfucker or ex-boyfriend crawling back to enact his vengeance right now.” She’s right, of course—all of them probably need to build a bunker together and just stay there, for the good of the universe. Multiverse. Whatever.

But the extra wards make him feel even better, even if they’re unnecessary. He’s being paranoid, but he feels like he can afford a bit of paranoia right now.

_Well, I hardly think you’re going to, you know, go shooting any Monsters any time soon._

“Hush now,” Eliot smiles. “I’m trying to meet you in dreamland.”

 _Yeah, yeah._ He can hear the smirk in Quentin’s voice, and warmth floods his veins. He can’t wait until he’s able to ruffle his hair, until he can see that insufferable smile with its constellation of a million dimples that surrounds it.

God, it’s been forever since he last saw Quentin. And he had thought it would be forever until they saw each other again, _if_ they ever saw each other again. For all Eliot knew, the Underworld was as cruel a place as the above, and Eliot’s life had been nothing but a series of cruel twists. Why should his death be any different?

He twists to fluff his pillow and turn it over, settling on his good side and staring out the little crack of window that’s open. The wards extend out a good yard or so from the building, covering the fire escape and a few inches past it. It doesn’t kill the smell of cigarette smoke or dampen the drunken girls who stumble home from the club every night at 4 AM, but the fresh air makes him feel less claustrophobic.

It’s not long until he’s in the elevator shaft again. The floor number begins at its usual 20, and Eliot wonders if he’ll be joined by Penny before or after he reaches the bottom. But he reaches the end faster than he expected— the next time he blinks, there’s the blinding white light, and then—

“Hey,” Quentin says. His eyes take a second to adjust, coming into focus staring at the carpeted floor.

“You ever notice this part of the Underworld kind of feels like an office space?” Eliot says, looking around. There are white walls, the carpet light grey, doors lining the hallway. “Is this even what it looks like?”

Quentin shrugs. “I’m pretty sure it’s tile, not carpet. But um, I don’t remember.”

Eliot shrugs too, smiling. Quentin looks—well, like Quentin had the last time he’d seen him that day in the park, with his wide eyes and silly haircut. Speaking of. “Why did you get your hair cut so short?”

“I didn’t.” Quentin laughs. “Brian—the guy I was before, when we were all different people—cut it.”

Eliot nods. “I heard I was some rebel royal. I can’t believe I got the hottest backstory.”

Quentin snorts. “I can. Or, well, I guess it would’ve been funny if Fogg had stuck you with a farm boy.” he says with a grin.

“Har, har,” Eliot deadpans, but he can’t keep his smile at bay for long. He reaches out, takes Quentin’s hand, and gives it a squeeze. When Quentin flinches, looking surprised, Eliot just shakes his head and squeezes again. “An anchor. I’ve pulled out of these dreams way too quickly before, and it seems this contact… it keeps me here.”

“Do you feel it?” Quentin asks, his voice hushed. “Does it feel like… like you’re actually holding my hand?”

Eliot has to think about that for a moment. There are times when he has nightmares, where a slap comes and he’ll wake up with his face stinging. There are other times—much more fun times—when he swears he can feel lips on his, around his cock, sliding across his body, but he’ll wake up with nothing but tangled sheets and sweat to show for something that had felt so real.

Here, now, with Quentin’s hand in his, thinking about how weird it is to be aware that he’s dreaming, that the body he’s in is more of a projected image in his mind, that Quentin’s body is probably a projected image of Quentin’s consciousness… he’s not sure if he could describe what he’s feeling as feeling.

But memory is a powerful son of a bitch, and there is an all-too-aware ache in his body that realizes he knows what Quentin’s hand feels like, even without being able to hold it. He knows what his hair would feel like between his fingers, and what his small body would feel like in a hug. Even without fifty years of knowledge, without their shared memories of the mosaic, Eliot would still know how Quentin felt.

“It does,” Eliot says, his voice softer than he anticipated. “Does it to you?”

Quentin nods, looking up at him with a smile. It’s weird, not seeing that look through a curtain of bangs.

“First thing we’re doing when we get out of here is growing out your hair,” Eliot jokes.

“Har, har,” Quentin repeats, squeezing Eliot’s hand. “Is—do you think Penny’s coming soon? I’m scared he won’t get here before—”

Suddenly, Eliot feels dizzy. His mind swirls, but he keeps hold of the anchor of Quentin’s hand. A moment later, everything stills, and Penny’s there.

“Holy shit.” Twenty-Three gapes, looking between them, crossing his arms over his chest. “How do I know this isn’t just a dream Quentin?”

Quentin shrugs. “I mean, I know dreams can be pretty, like, convincing. But I mean, I can tell you everything about the Fillory books, and Eliot’s never even read those. Um, and I mean, you can try touching me, I guess? Eliot says he can feel me, but we’re not sure if that’s sense memory or actual physical sensation. Which is fascinating, really—do you guys study dream magic in the Psychic discipline? Because I would really be interested in seeing the effects of dreams on the physical body once this is all said and done—”

Penny holds up a hand. “Yeah, okay, it’s him.”

Eliot snorts. “That’s it? That’s all you need?”

Penny shakes his head and walks over, puts a hand on Quentin’s shoulder. “Well, technically, this would have proved it, too. If he was a dream, I couldn’t touch him. Not like this. It’s good to see you, man.”

Quentin smiles and shakes his head. “ _So_ much more different than our Penny.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment even though I’m not sure it is,” Twenty-Three says, but he’s still smiling. “I’ll be damned. You’re in Eliot’s head.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying, by the way. In case you just didn’t realize those words had actually left my mouth.”

Penny rolls his eyes. “Man, you know how crazy it sounds.”

“We’ve seen crazier, to be fair,” Quentin says.

“How the hell did you even get in here?”

Eliot shrugs. “It beats the both of us. He’s been in here since I woke up in the hospital. Or, well—since I woke up and realized he was… dead. But he’s not dead. Right?”

Penny shrugs. “Look, I know as much about Underworld Bureaucracy as you do. That’s not my specialty here. You’d have more luck trying to get into contact with your Penny and sorting that out.”

“That may be our next step then,” Eliot says with a resolute nod.

“But first, let’s try the easy way.” Twenty-Three grins. “Quentin, hold on.” He loops an arm around his waist, and suddenly—

Suddenly, they’re gone. For a split second, Eliot’s alone. And then, like a skipped frame, Quentin blips back into existence without Penny at his side.

“Holy shit,” Quentin gasps, looking around. “Where did—”

And then Penny is there, looking just as dazed as Quentin. Soaking wet, gasping for air.. “Jesus Christ!”

“What happened,” Eliot says—it’s not a question because he’s not sure there’s an answer.

“One second we were travelling back to Earth, the next I’m in the middle of the fucking ocean!” Penny says when he gets his voice back. “And not like, on the surface. I’m talking _the middle._ ”

Quentin frowns. “But I didn’t go anywhere,” he says. “It felt like I just… jumped up in the air and landed again.”

“Fuck,” Penny says. “Okay, well—can we try again? Maybe I just overshot it, I don’t know.”

Quentin casts Eliot a weary glance, like he’s asking for permission. “I don’t know,” he parrots, throwing his hands up. “Don’t look at me.”

Penny nods, looking intent and _ready,_ clenching one fist before wrapping his other arm around Quentin. “All right, and—”

The same blip. Quentin is there, slightly gone, back again. He frowns, looks around, and then Penny is there, a little faster this time. Now, his whole body is a glowing blue, electric and crackling. Eliot’s eyes go wide.

“Penny, stop—”

“I’m not,” Twenty-Three gasps, and with strength that Eliot is not sure he could ever muster, he stretches his hands out and keeps them dead still, palms facing the ground, until the blue current coursing through him crackles and vanishes like a dying fire. He’s swaying on his feet as the glow subsides, pressing a palm to his forehead and breathing deeply.

“Magic surged,” he says again after a moment. “When I tried to take Quentin out. Magic surged.”

Eliot frowns. “In Manhattan?”

“Dude, _everywhere,_ I think. I wouldn’t be surprised if Julia was getting a call from Fogg right now. Fuck, we have to—we’re going to have to figure this out outside,” Penny says, obviously still shaken from his brush with Niffinhood. “Quentin’s tied pretty damn hard to you, and we have to figure out why. And I’m talking his subconscious—it’s almost fused with yours.”

Eliot frowns, looking over at Quentin. “But he says he has his own thoughts and memories and feelings, just like when he was alive.”

“Yeah, but I _can’t separate you._ I physically can’t without almost Niffining out or opening up a magical black hole. This isn’t some sort of jailbreak—your wards _are_ all the way down, right?”

Eliot frowns, his pride slightly wounded. “Why, William. Why would I lie to you?”

“Okay, dude, _never_ call me that again—and I have to ask to see what the fuck is going on here! I don’t want to blame anyone, but—”

“Guys,” Quentin interrupts, and when Eliot looks back over at him, he’s hugging himself, shifting his weight from foot to foot and tugging on the sleeves of his hoodie. “Maybe Eliot should wake up. And—and you can figure it out. Out there. I’m not going to be much help,” he says with a tiny shrug, “and as much as I enjoy the company, if Eliot and I are tied…”

“This might be knitting us even tighter together,” Eliot says, his heart sinking down, slipping from between his ribs and into his stomach, down, down, down to his feet. “Fuck. _Fuck._ ”

“Let’s not go there yet,” Penny chides, but he doesn’t look convinced. “We don’t know what’s keeping you here, Quentin. But you’re right, we’re not going to get any work done here. I’m going to travel out, and then I’m going to wake Eliot’s ass up. Okay?”

Eliot feels distant again, the stress of the situation causing his mind to feel like it’s wading through mud, pushing through heavy globs of muck. “Okay,” he says, shaken, and Quentin reaches out to squeeze his hand. On impulse, he squeezes back, but quickly remembers himself and pulls away. “We can’t risk it. What if it just ties you here further?”

Quentin frowns quietly, tugging his sleeve again before nodding. “Okay,” he says, his voice small.

“I’ll meet you out there.” Penny cracks his knuckles, preparing himself, before he turns to Quentin. “And—seriously. It was nice seeing you.” 

With that, he vanishes.

“I don’t have much time,” Eliot says the second Penny is gone, turning to Quentin. “He’s going to wake me up any second. I just—I have to say, if you’re going to be stuck here with me, if there’s any way we can’t get you out or we lose you or whatever, I have to—

“Motherfucker!” Eliot gasps, his arms flailing wildly as Penny wakes him up, almost catching a fist in the stomach for his efforts, “I’m up, I’m up!”

Penny gives him one more shake, because he’s a bastard, before pulling back. They’re not the only ones there. Penny’s meditation station is set up with the appropriate incense and cushion, but Alice is sitting on the window seat and Julia is expectantly standing in the doorway. Kady and Margo and Josh are scattered around the room.

“Well,” Eliot says, throat dry. “Why don’t you do the honors, since I got to be the one last time?”

Penny nods, looking around at their friends. “Quentin’s alive. And yes, before you ask,” he says, seeing Julia opening her mouth out of the corner of his eye, “I’m sure.”

There’s an aching moment of complete silence. Alice’s face is doing this thing where her eyes are ahead of her body on emotion—her mouth is in a thin, stoic line, her eyebrows set in neutral, but she’s on the verge of tears. Julia has gone white as a sheet, and Kady’s jaw is hanging open.

“That’ll teach you fuckers to doubt me again,” Eliot mutters.

It’s not his fault he’s always right.

* * *

It’s only natural that, after everything’s said and done, Margo comes crawling into bed with him.

The ensuing chaos that had been the revelation of _Quentin’s alive, Quentin’s alive?! Holy shit, Quentin’s alive!_ had been enough excitement for several lifetimes. Julia had asked Penny to recount the experience over and over. Twenty-Three had looked hurt that she didn’t believe him immediately, but his smile had grown fonder when she asked him to explain exactly which part of the ocean he had ended up in, and what the magical surge had felt like exactly. 

Alice— after finally pulling herself together— squeaked, “Well, fuck! I spent all that money on a tombstone!” and Kady had laughed and laughed and laughed. Alice got angry after that— as angry as one can be with a huge smile on their face— and then it all descended into blissful, delicious bedlam.

Julia had been the one to get their revelry back on track, promising to go visit the library at Brakebills to see what she could find. Alice volunteered to go to Fillory with Josh, and Kady promised to use her hedge connections to see if anyone had heard about anything like this happening before, and Penny was… well, Penny was going to rest, but he had promised Kady to take her to some international hedge hot spots, if she wanted.

The whole time, Eliot got to experience the joy of Quentin seeing his friends celebrate his being not dead. He wonders, now, if Quentin had seen them all grieving his death—how that must have felt, being in the body of someone grieving him as well. 

But when he was watching Alice and Kady laugh about tombstones and Julia finally get the spark back in her eyes, all he could hear was an echoed, _Oh._ Genuine surprise had flooded his body, and he wasn’t sure where it was his and where it was Quentin’s, but there were seconds where it had hurt. Hurt because, within that surprise, Eliot realized Quentin wasn’t expecting his friends to be excited to hear he was alive.

While everyone else sets out, Eliot chooses— as much as he can choose, given his limited mobility— to stay in bed.

He’s back to reading the book on wards—trying to see if there’s anything about consciousness or merging consciousnesses or having a whole other fucking human being in your head—when Margo opens the door, closes it, turns off the light, and slides into bed.

“I’m sleeping here tonight,” she announces. It’s not a question.

“Josh kick you out so he could sleep with his stand mixer?”

“Please. I’m so much prettier than she is,” Margo grins. She’s dressed in a silk robe, and Eliot half wants to know what lingerie set she’s put on, but she waves at him off before he can ask. “It’s boring underneath here, honey. I’m better off keeping it on.”

“There’s just no spark in our marriage anymore.” Eliot sighs and floats the book away. “We’re going to have to find another way to keep the romance alive.”

“You never put out anymore,” Margo counters. “It’s all, _I have a headache, honey,_ and, _Our best friend’s living inside my head._ ”

Eliot laughs delightedly, and Margo wiggles her way underneath the covers. “So,” she continues, patting Eliot’s thigh so he’ll float over one of his silk hair wraps to her, “I got the feeling you were a bit overwhelmed after our dear Penny had his way with your head.”

“Overwhelmed is a word,” Eliot confirms, watching her out of the corner of his eye as she gathers her waves into her hands, pulling them into a half-hearted bun before wrapping the fabric around her head, tying it off in the front. “There was just… a lot of stuff that happened in there.”

“Well, I’m never going to know if you don’t tell me,” she counters, but her voice is softer. “You have any of that moisturizer I bought you?”

Eliot smirks, searching with his mind before remembering, ah, yes, dresser, and floats it overl. “You know you’re a perfectly gifted telekinetic as well, right?”

“But I like the way you do itl,” she counters with a shit-eating grin, opening the jar, dipping one acrylic fingernail in to grab a small amount.

“When did you have time to get your nails done?”

“Hey, in-between you almost dying and Quentin dying and then not being dead, I needed something to be glamorous in my life.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“No, you’re hedging. What happened in there?”

Eliot sighs, propping himself up on his side, careful to tuck a pillow under where his gash sits above his hip. “Penny tried to travel Quentin out of my head, and it didn’t work. He almost Niffined out in the process.”

Margo nods. “Yeah, I heard all about that when Julia asked him to repeat the story five hundred times.”

“Right,” Eliot says. “Well. He said—he said when he tried to take Quentin away, the pull back to me was too strong. Like we were tied together. Like somehow, Quentin’s consciousness and mine were starting to… I don’t know. Tether to each other.”

Margo finishes massaging the lotion into her face and frowns, setting the jar aside. “Okay,” she says. “Gonna have to try and make that clearer for me.”

“Penny said the reason magic surged was because he tried to pull us apart from each other and couldn’t. That Quentin was so tied down to me that he almost lost control. Which means…” Eliot huffs out a breath, shrugging. “I don’t know what it means. It could mean nothing. It could just be that we’ve never travelled a human being outside of someone else’s mind before. Or it could mean…”

Margo frowns. “Hey, no, don’t go there.”

“No, Margo,” Eliot says, breathing deeply, trying to get as much oxygen as possible. His lungs feel like they’re constricting. “This could all be for nothing. This could mean Quentin’s stuck in there, or worse—that he’s losing himself to me. I could be absorbing him like a twin in the womb, for all I know.”

_Okay, ew. I’m trying not to listen in here, but that’s gross._

“Your face is doing that thing it does when he’s talking to you,” Margo says, jabbing a finger into Eliot’s bicep. “And I hope he’s telling you to fuck off with that train of thought. Because it’s going to get us where? Nowhere.”

“I know, but—”

“But nothing,” Margo says, putting a hand up. “I’m not going to lay her and let you mope about something that’s not even happened yet.”

“I’m fucking scared.” Eliot laughs, shrugging again, like this is just a casual thing to admit. Like it’s nothing. Like Eliot’s fear is just a given. “I’m scared we got all this hope, and now it’s just… it’s going to be for nothing.”

Margo goes quiet for a moment, then a minute, then two.

“So let me break down for you what’s happening,” she says after the most agonizing silence of Eliot’s life. “Our friend got lost in the Seam and his consciousness got tied to yours. He’s now living in your head. We’re now trying to break him out of your head.”

Eliot nods. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Margo just smiles. It’s soft, a gentle and understanding smile, but there’s a hint of amusement there that Eliot recognizes from years of Margo exposure. “Honey,” she says, reaching out to take a curl between two fingers give it a tug. “Explain to me how that’s any worse than anything else we’ve been through?”

Eliot opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. “Well…”

“Uh huh,” she says, leaning over and placing a kiss on his lips, a soft peck. “This is just going to be another boring day at the office for us.”

Eliot nods, because she’s right—this isn’t the worst thing they’ve ever gone through together. Eliot’s had worse. Quentin’s had worse. They’ve all seen worse.

“Good night, Eliot,” Margo says, resting her head on her pillow and closing her eyes. “Stop thinking about it.”

“I will,” Eliot promises softly, adjusting his pillows.

But even then, with all the shit they’ve seen, with all the fire they’ve walked through, with all the blood they’ve shed and the people they’ve lost and the lives they’ve ruined, even though they had seen worse—

Even then, he’s never felt like he had when he had woken up, the moon high and the stars still shining and the earth still turning its slow turn like everything was normal, and found out that Quentin was gone.

Lying there, feeling his body begin to float away from him, Eliot knows, as sure as he knows that his blood runs red and his best isn’t enough, he couldn’t survive that again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fen picks flowers. Alice rolls a joint. Dream a little dream of me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY. i have had a busy couple of weeks, folks, so sorry for the delay, but HERE IT IS: SO MUCH PLOT NO ONE ASKED FOR!!!
> 
> thank you so much for your continued support and comments, they really mean the whole world to me. i know this is a weird time to be posting fic, so just to reiterate what i've been saying on twitter: BLACK LIVES MATTER, and if you don't believe that this may not be the fic for you because i don't have space for that, sorry! please continue to sign petitions, do what you can, and be an active force of change in our world. notalonehere is now doing a fandom market for BLM causes; please check that out! (@notaIonehere on twitter, the 'l' is a capital 'i')
> 
> note: in this chapter, quentin talks about his death a bit. it's towards the end, and it's brief, but just look out for yourselves. if you need specific marks in the chapter, lemme know.
> 
> okay, i think that's it for now. love you love you love you
> 
> PS: mr stale happenstance, no. not for you

There’s something so sexy about being a chronic insomniac.

At least, that’s what Eliot has told himself for years; his childhood had been waxing and waning periods of sleepless months and hibernation weeks, his undergrad years and first year of Brakebills a blissful romance with 4 AM. Sleep had become like a tempestuous lover to Eliot. They would fuck with each other for a brief, whirlwind moment before not speaking for ages, only to crawl back with half-hearted apologies and promises to make it work this time.

“I don’t think you’re sleeping enough,” Alice says the next day when he stumbles into the living room. There are what appears to be a hundred books strewn about the floor, covering the entire area rug and coffee table and piled high on top of the gold chair. Kady is pecking away at her laptop at the kitchen island, but Eliot can sense she’s not too thrilled about being pushed away from her couch by what Eliot can only guess is Alice’s attempt at recreating the Library of Alexandria.

“Um,” Eliot says, eloquent as always. “Wonderland, I hate to break it to you, but I’ve been sleeping eighteen hours a day.”

Alice scrunches up her nose at the nickname. He’s going to keep it. “No,” she says. “You’ve been sharing a… space. With Quentin. Your body hasn’t actually been dreaming, it’s been projecting. You have no energy because you haven’t entered into REM consistently in over a week.”

“Okay, cool. I’m going to need more coffee for this, so,” he trails off, leaning on his cane to work his way into the kitchen. Kady snorts.

“She’s right,” she chimes in. “Penny mentioned something about your consciousnesses being tied too tightly together. It might be better if you hold off on the nightly Quentin visits.”

“And,” Alice continues, flipping through a book, “dreams can often unlock issues with memory loss. If there’s anything you can remember that would tell us how Quentin’s consciousness got tied to yours—”

“What is there to remember?” Finally by the coffee pot, Eliot has to float a mug down from the cabinet to avoid over-stretching his side. “I woke up and he was there.”

Alice gives him a tight nod, her gaze still resolutely set on him. “Maybe there was something that The Monster said, or did, to Quentin. We weren’t around all the time, and your—its—bond with him was pretty close. Closer than it was to the rest of us. Maybe it tied them together, somehow.”

“Maybe,” Eliot sighs, but he doubts it. He doesn’t remember most of the stuff from the time he spent with The Monster, trapped inside his own brain. But God, maybe—could he have—could something that _he_ had been inside of—

“Stop spiraling,” Kady deadpans. “You’re going to ruin my coffee.”

* * *

He’s wearing a fucking t-shirt.

The air around him is cold, and stale, and there’s almost no sound in the 7x7 metal box he’s in. The tile on the floor is way too shiny, and looking down, he can see himself reflected back in a blurry refraction, a giant black and white blob with too-long hair and blood on a shirt he wouldn’t be caught dead in.

Except.

Except he had died in this shirt, hadn’t he? So—hah, funny. It would be a good joke to tell Margo.

He had died in this shirt.

When he looks for the buttons on the elevator, he finds a glowing blue screen instead, inlaid in the metal paneling. There’s an infinitely high number displayed there, and he watches as it ticks down so fast he can hardly register the increment—flashes of _two billion one hundred fifty seven million seven hundred twenty thousand_ dropping like flies, and if he focuses hard enough on his feet, he can feel the _whoosh_ of them dropping down an endless shaft to the Underworld.

Eliot doesn’t fancy himself predictable, or boring, but the fact that his unconscious world has been centered in this particular hellscape makes his normal odd menagerie of dreams look like Oscar winners compared to this D-movie plot. He almost wants to scream, or try and see if he can travel somewhere else, or attempt flying, just to see if he can give this scenario a little more bread and butter, when—

He sees his hands move before he registers that he’s not moving them.

Wait. He’s not moving them—he’s just watching them move, of their own accord, like his body has a separate mind of its own. And there’s this noise ringing in his ears, loud as sin, crackling like fire and damp like it’s coming from underwater. It sounds like radio static and a swarm of bees and the whir of an air conditioner all at once, but broadcast through a thick fortress of brick and foam insulation.

_What the fuck._

He watches as his own hand raises up, balls itself into a fist, and smashes itself _hard_ into the blue screen, and he can hear the _thud_ and see the vibrations on his skin, see the way his knuckles give way, the way the screen ripples just barely, as if it’s been brushed by a gentle touch rather than slammed into.

“—going to work,” a voice, clear, comes through the fog.

Quentin.

Quentin, who is standing right beside him in the elevator, looking his patented mixture of fond and annoyed. But also looks calm, despite the red nose and the tear-stained cheeks and shaking hands and the _one billion eight hundred forty eight million one hundred thousand_ countdown blaring in Eliot’s eyes.

Quentin opens his mouth to talk, but that same noise—nothing and everything all at once—comes out, and Eliot’s vision is too blurry, he can’t read his lips.

He’s seeing flashes of Quentin, like a camera shuttering and skipping twenty, thirty frames at once. Anger, sadness, relief, laughter—a whole conversation passes on Quentin’s face each time he sees it, and Eliot can’t _hear him_ , can’t figure out what he’s saying.

“Eliot,” Quentin says, suddenly too clear, “don’t—”

And then he’s grabbing Quentin’s wrist, _tugging,_ hard, and—

And he’s staring at the ceiling of Kady’s apartment, watching as the fan spins a lazy circle, his lungs tight and his brow sweaty and the mountain of sheets tangled around his ankles.

He gives them a little kick, his mouth dryer than a cotton swab, and reaches over for the water bottle on his bedside table.

_Are you okay?_

Quentin.

“Yeah,” Eliot says once he’s downed half of the water, cool droplets leaking from the corner of his lips and down his chin. “I… I think. Weird dreams.”

 _Oh. I can’t see them._ His voice sounds apologetic. _Bad dreams?_

“Just weird,” Eliot says, though he supposes he doesn’t have to talk out loud. But it feels a little more… like Quentin is there, if he does. And he knows Quentin is doing his best to filter out all of Eliot’s thoughts. “Do you sleep, in there?”

_I… I think? Maybe? There are times where I’m able to tune you out for like, um, what I assume is a really long time, because I’ll come back and you’ll be doing something entirely different from the last time I saw you, or, um, it’ll be dark outside, or whatever. But I’m also not in a body right now, so I don’t really have the need for sleep._

“God, this is so fucking weird.”

_I know. I’m sorry._

“Why are you sorry?”

_I mean—I guess I’m not sorry. I didn’t do anything. Or maybe I did? Do you think I invaded your mind on purpose?_

Eliot snorts and sits up a bit, grabbing his phone. His eyes hurt when he sees the numbers on the screen, a bit too bright—it’s 4:30 AM. “No, Quentin,” he softly says. “I don’t think you’re capable of—you know what? Hang on, I’m coming in there.”

_Huh?_

Eliot makes himself comfortable again before setting an alarm for 8:00. He closes his eyes, loops an arm underneath the pillow, takes a deep, sighing breath.

It takes him a few minutes to sleep again. His body doesn’t have the same thick tiredness that it’s had for the past two weeks—maybe Alice was right, and his sleep cycle had been totally fucked, or whatever.

When he does fall asleep this time, it’s on the same elevator he’s used to. He’s wearing the same outfit he had been when he fell asleep that night. Quentin greats him at the bottom of the elevator shaft with a big, fond grin.

“You don’t have to actually be asleep to talk to me,” he says, walking over to Eliot and throwing his arms around him in a hug.

“No, but it’s easier than potentially having Kady walk in on me and thinking I’m crazy, _again._ ”

“I suppose,” Quentin says as he pulls back, smiling. “Hey, you think you can travel us somewhere else this time?”

“I don’t think I have the power to change… this,” Eliot says with a wave. “My mind seems to be stuck on the Underworld. I’ve got a new obsession with it.”

“Huh.” Quentin nods, taking in the information, and Eliot watches as he looks around.

“I probably shouldn’t be doing this,” Eliot says, and his voice is a traitor, trembling and coming out way too unsure. “Alice and Julia—they’re pretty scared of what Penny said, of us being too tied together. They think the more time I spend with you, the more chance we run of… permanently tying ourselves to each other.”

Quentin’s face does something weird then, but he looks at Eliot with a wave of his hand. “I don’t feel any more melded to you than I did when this first started. I still know things you don’t know, and have memories you don’t have, and I can’t feel any of yours or access any of that. We’re not overlapping. We’re just… living in the same head.”

God, Eliot wishes he had some of that faith. He’s never been able to conjure up the wild-eyed hope that Quentin manages to wrangle in sometimes. It’s all worst-case scenarios and exit plans for Eliot Waugh. Quentin Coldwater is someone capable of _belief,_ while all Eliot can fathom is mistrust and disappointment.

“Yeah, maybe,” he allows, because the last thing he wants right now is the fire to go out of them both. And besides, he’s here anyway, despite the sinking feeling that he’s signing off on both their death certificates. What does that say about him?

Quentin smiles though, and reaches out to touch Eliot’s hand again with a little giggle. “You know, I can feel it, too. I know I, I mean, I said that last time, but it’s weird. I don’t get to _feel_ anything, not like you do. When you’re touching things outside or whatever, I don’t feel any of that. You could be on fire and I would just be, you know, minding my own business.”

“Glad to know.”

Quentin pinches his wrist with a sharp little grin. “But when you’re in here, and I can touch you, I can. I can _feel_ it. It reminds me I am alive. Makes me feel a little less insane.”

And god, Eliot’s mind is a traitor, because there’s a part of it that _wonders_ in a way that he hasn’t allowed himself to wonder since he woke up from what he thought was his worst nightmare to his actual worst nightmare.

Wonders how it would feel if he reminded them of something he had once denied them both of. Reminded him of how it would feel to just lean forward and share the same breath—would Quentin be able to feel that? Would he be able to feel the hot air between them in that sacred moment before touch, in that aching distance between their lips? What about his hands on his hips—would he be able to feel that? The grip on the back of his neck?

And oh, Eliot is a creature made from yearning. He grips Quentin’s hand a bit tighter, imagines and remembers the feel of it, gives himself away to the insanity of want.

“I like being reminded you’re alive, too. Makes _me_ feel a little bit less crazy for housing you in my mind rent free.”

“Oh, no, you’re definitely crazy,” Quentin says solemnly. “I’m afraid that’s been terminal, um, for as long as I’ve known you.”

“I guess that makes us a pair of lunatics, then.”

Quentin’s eyes flash bright. “I guess so.”

* * *

He wakes up to the smell of coffee and a whack to the head.

“Hey,” Kady says, her arm still bent in striking position, like a rattlesnake poised to bite. “Wake up.”

“I’m up, I’m up.” Eliot frowns, rubbing his forehead. “Is this how you used to wake up Penny? No wonder you two fought all the time. They teach you bedside manner in that _How To Be A Stone Cold Bitch_ manual, or are you missing that chapter?”

“Chapter seven is how to kill a man without blinking,” Kady says smoothly, but she’s offering him a mug of coffee that smells like caramel, swirling with thick cream. The mug is practically the size of a bowl, and Eliot can feel the caffeine radiating off it, like a pond of latent energy beckoning him to drink. He takes it gratefully, sighs as the hot liquid slides down the back of his throat.

“You made this?”

“Josh. I don’t put any flavor in my coffee and I wouldn’t in yours.”

“Unless it was poison.”

Kady grins. “Not my style,” she teases, hiding a yawn in her elbow. Eliot taps the home screen of his phone—7:00, an hour before the alarm he had set, and early by anyone’s standards, except maybe Alice’s.

“Why are you here?”

“Alice,” Kady says, and yep, confirmed. “She—we wanted to know if the dream cookies worked.”

“Ah, yes. The _drug Eliot without him realizing_ cookies.”

The day before, Josh had shoved a metal tray under his nose and announced, “They’re little stars!” Sure enough, a cluster of periwinkle cookies had donned the tray, smelling strongly of lemon and vanilla and glittering brightly with edible sparkles.

“Hey,” Josh says, appearing in the doorway with a pout. “I told you all about them!”

" _After_ I had already eaten one,” Eliot counters.

“Because you shoved one in your mouth before I could say anything!”

“Did it work?” Alice, now, appearing beside Josh. She’s in her pyjamas, having slept on the couch the night before, and Eliot wonders if they’re all just going to move into the penthouse, a pile of lost puppies cuddling each other. He thanks God Margo is at least holding the Cottage down.

The cookies had lavender and mugwort and ashwagandha and something Josh had referred to as “bitter-grass,” as well as about twenty other ingredients Eliot couldn’t be arsed to remember. All of them were supposed to induce and keep Eliot dreaming throughout the night, as well as give him the ability to recall dreams.

Well. Some help that had been.

He shrugs, not wanting to disappoint, but… “I didn’t really have a dream that made any sense,” he hedges, because it had been true. He had seen… _something._ Something about the elevator scene being different, something about him wearing the dumb t-shirt with the stupid slogan and the infinite numbers on a blue screen and Quentin being there and the way his voice had sounded like moths beating their wings, _something_ about the whole package had gotten to him. He couldn’t shake it off, even now, sitting up and feeling the familiar pain shoot up his side.

Alice frowns, her shoulders drooping. “Dammit,” she mutters, rubbing her eyes. She doesn’t look like she got much sleep the night before. “We’ll have to try again tonight.”

“I do feel better rested,” Eliot says, as if that’s any consolation. “So, um, I think it did put me in REM.”

“Well,” she sniffs, “good. We’re going to need all the energy you have to figure out how you managed to mentally absorb another human being, and even more to figure out how to get him out, so.” She points to the cup of coffee in Eliot’s hand and gives him a teasing little smile. “Drink up.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Eliot grins, and Josh looks at him expectantly as he takes another sip. “It’s good, Hoberman, don’t get your Martha Stewart underwear in a bunch.”

“She makes underwear?”

“Oh my god,” Kady mutters, standing up and shaking out her curls. “I’m going back to bed now.”

Alice grabs an armful of books and comes back into the room, crawling into bed beside Eliot and handing him one. “Start reading,” she says. “Or skimming. Or whatever.”

Eliot loses a few hours that way, picking up a book, thumbing through it, looking for anything that could give him even the barest hint as to what they’re up against. Quentin’s voice stays quiet, only poking its way in to encourage him or to say _Oh, look there,_ but for the most part it’s silent, Alice scribbling notes furiously in one of her notebooks and muttering to herself.

Margo finds them like that when she shows up with lunch. “I got sandwiches,” she announces from the hall, “and an ex-wife!”

“An ex-wife?” comes Fen’s voice, and Eliot notices the way Alice’s eyes widen. “What is ‘ex’? Hi, Alice! Hi, Eliot!”

Eliot tenses on instinct. Bless her, she doesn’t mean any harm, but there’s still something about her presence that causes Eliot to go on the defensive. Probably the way, you know, they had been forced to act out the pretend heterosexual marriage scenario Eliot had been so afraid of as a kid, before there had been magic and bus crashes and bloody noses and boys stumbling out of bushes with weird names. _You’re a king, but this is the only way you can be one_ hadn’t ever made him feel particularly like High King. If it was in his blood, why didn’t destiny know _this_ wasn’t?

Still, she was a nice enough girl.

“Hey, Fen,” he calls back, waving.

“I have brought you some Fillorian healing herbs,” she says brightly, motioning to the flower basket tucked to her side, hanging from her elbow. “And I welcome you back to the world of Eliot! That Monster was ‘overstaying his welcome’,” she says with a grin, her fingers crooking in air quotes.

Eliot smiles tightly. “I appreciate it, Fen. Did you…?”

“Julia and I went to Fillory last night,” Margo shrugs. “Found a stray, took her home.”

“Told you to make sure they were spayed before you did that.” Alice’s elbow jabs into his arm as both he and Margo laugh and Fen mouths _spayed_?. He reaches out for his coffee, frowning when there’s no more to drink.

“Anyway, Eliot,” Fen says brightly, “if you would like, I will help you with some of your pain.”

Margo raises an eyebrow and shrugs, as if to say _I didn’t mean for this to happen but here we are_. “And I told her about—”

“Yes! Hello, Quentin-who-lives-in-Eliot’s-head!” Fen smiles, waving her hand in Eliot's face as she steps closer. “Margo wanted to know if I could take you out, but I’m not sure how to. However, I’m here to help! And maybe if Eliot is out of pain, he can think clearer! More clearly?”

“I’m not a telephone,” Eliot grumbles, but Quentin’s voice comes bright in his head, obviously amused by the Fillorian’s perpetual innocence.

_Thank you, Fen. Tell her I said thank you. And be nice about it._

“Or what, you’ll kick me?” Eliot mutters under his breath, but smiles up at Fen. “Quentin says hello, and thank you,” he relates back to her in a sing-song voice. “And that you look really pretty today.”

_No I don’t! Not that she—not—I mean, she does, but—_

“Well!” Fen squeaks, pink coloring her cheeks. “What a charming surprise! Maybe I should visit from Fillory more often.”

“That’s not necessary,” Alice says coldly, barely looking up from her book. Fen doesn’t break her stride.

“And Alice, I have some herbs here for dreaming, too!”

 _That_ gets Alice’s attention.

“What kind?” she cautiously says, bookmarking her page and closing the book in her lap.

“We call some of them Umber’s breath, and this one,” she says, pointing to a baby blue bloom with what seems like infinite petals, “is called a Lorian lullaby, and this one—”

“No, no,” Alice says, holding her hand up. “What do they _do."_

“Oh! They help you dream.”

“ _How._ ”

Fen frowns. “Well, I don’t know! We use them in teas to soothe fussy children who won’t sleep and those who have nightmares. The Lorian lullaby is said to bring prophetic dreams to whoever sleeps with one bloom under their pillow, one in their throat, one over their heart, and one in their stomach, but I’m not sure—”

“How many did you bring?”

Fen brightens. “Oh, a whole bundle!”

Alice turns to Eliot, looking him over. “It seems like the instructions mean they want you to both drink and eat the flower, and then lay one over your heart and under your head. Fen, how do they taste?”

“Oh, terrible,” Fen says. Somehow, her voice still seems cheery. “But they are very potent, and the others will help you sleep with the taste still in your mouth.”

“That sounds promising,” Eliot chimes in. “And it’s probably not the most disgusting thing I’ve had in my mouth, by a long shot.”

“That’s the spirit,” Margo snorts.

“We’ll try it tonight. Thank you, Fen,” Alice says, giving her a nod, and Eliot’s not sure what’s going on with them, other than the fact that they really have never spent much time together. Whatever. He’s not here to make sure everyone is best friends.

“Of course,” Fen says with a wave. She sets her basket of herbs down and begins to pick out some of the buds. “And I don’t know much about people being stuck in heads, but I will help with what I can. Do you have access to hot water?”

Eliot forgets that Fen doesn’t have a great concept on how water works in big Earth cities. “Um, yes. We do.”

“Wonderful,” Fen chirps. “I can make a poultice of these herbs to apply to your wound and it will take away the pain.”

“Why haven’t we been doing that all along?”

“Hey, I don’t know what type of bullshit Fillory gets up to,” Margo says with a shrug, “and I ruled it briefly.”

“As did I,” Eliot reminds.

Fen chimes in her own, “Me, too!” as she begins grinding up the herbs with a mortar and pestle. She puts her whole strength into it, the sound of the marble scraping the side of the bowl almost melodic, soothing Eliot as he dozes off. Margo climbs onto the bed and begins to help Alice read, and their discussion of dream space and the subconscious lulls him into a place where time ceases to exist, minutes passing by quickly and blurring together.

When he blinks back into present time, Fen is kneeling beside him with a bowl full of green mush. There’s clay drying on her hands, and steam coming up from the bowl.

“I know we are no longer married,” she says, but thankfully she doesn’t seem too displeased by it, “but I am going to have to ask you to take your shirt off so I can apply the poultice.”

“I’ve never been so seduced,” Eliot teases, sitting up. He casts a look over to Margo with a pout, putting his arms up in the air and reaching tall. It takes her a moment to get the picture, rolling her eyes as she crawls over.

“A big baby,” she scolds him, and Alice just laughs, a shocked little sound, as Margo reaches down and tugs Eliot’s shirt up and over his head. When the fabric is off, he looks down.

He’s never going to be completely okay with what he sees, so long as the gash is there. It’s not a clean cut—Margo had, apparently, snagged the axe trying to pull it out, so there’s a bit of a jag in the line. It’s pink around the edges, bright red in the center, a white line curling around his stitches. At its best, it looks like a giant cat has neatly scratched him above his hip with one singular claw; at its worst, it looks like he… well, got chopped by an axe.

Lipson had promised no scar, but for now, the scarring is prominent, a reminder that Eliot’s body doesn’t belong to him, isn’t a thing he can control. If he stares at it for long enough, he’ll start to feel that all-too-familiar pull away from himself, where he floats just above his skin and forgets what it means to feel solid. His body had come to him at a price—one that everyone else had been willing to pay. But now, looking and _feeling_ what it’s cost, Eliot’s not so sure it was a worthy trade off.

He had been dead, too. For fifteen minutes. When he had come back, his body was a stranger housing both him and his supposedly dead best friend.

It was a little more than any of them had ever bargained for, at any rate. Was this worth all of it?

“You’re worth it,” Eliot murmurs sleepily to Quentin. “If you heard any of that.”

“What?” Alice asks from beside him. The early afternoon sun is blaring in through the half-drawn shades. There's a pitcher of iced tea that hadn't been there before Eliot started floating, condensation sweating down the side of the glass.

“He’s talking to Quentin,” Margo says, her eyes still trained on the book splayed across her lap, and Eliot feels that same fondness for her he can never put into words.

“I’m going to apply the poultice now,” Fen says, dipping her whole hand into the bowl and scooping out some of the clay and herb mixture. It smells absolutely putrid, like rotting, wet earth, and Eliot is _not_ looking forward to the Fillorian equivalent of Gwenyth Paltrow’s _goop_ coming into contact with his body. And he can't be entirely sure Kady isn't going to kill him if they get it on her sheets, whether or not he magics the stain off.

But Fen’s faster than his complaints, and she steadies Eliot's torso with her clean hand as she applies it to his side. She slides her palm, wet and sticky with the solution, over the gash, before following over it with two fingers placing pressure in small circles up and down the line, rubbing the herbal liquid in.

“Mister bear, missus doe, how does your garden grow?” she sings softly. “Tall and skinny, with flowers a-plenty, to please our Ember’s nose!”

Eliot laughs, loud, surprised at the lyrical turn, and Fen looks up at him with a confused expression, one that says she clearly doesn’t understand why her song would be so funny when it’s _something we sing to hurt children, Eliot_ , but as she’s going on her explanation of the time she got hurt when her father accidentally left out some of his equipment and she had tripped over it and hurt her knee, Eliot realizes—

He’s not in pain.

“Fen,” he gasps, eyes wide. “Fen, what the fuck did you _do?”_ His hands go to his side, both of them, to touch and grasp and feel— _nothing._

Margo sits up, immediately on the defensive. “What did you do? Did you hurt him? What the fuck did you put on him, Fen, I swear—”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Eliot rushes out, if only to stop the train that is Margo Hanson’s anger. “It—I don’t feel _anything."_

Fen shimmies, a little shake of her shoulders, like a preening bird, and sets the poultice aside with a small clap of her hands. “I believe the expression is ‘I told you so’.”

Eliot laughs, leaning over to kiss her forehead, feeling a fondness for her he hasn’t felt in a very long time. Though their marriage had been doomed from the start and fraught with latent trauma, Eliot appreciates this Fen—the Fen that is resilient and resourceful and wants to help her friends.

“Thank you,” he murmurs into her hair.

“Perhaps the absence of a pain response will facilitate easier dreaming,” Alice says, and it sounds like she doesn’t recognize the fact that there’s anyone else in the room, conducting her own little lecture series to the army of notes surrounding her. “Your body will release less adrenaline, which means your nightmares will probably be less prominent, and we can finally get some answers.”

“We’re putting a lot of stock into this whole dream theory,” Eliot frowns as he lets go of Fen, looking down at his hip and where the gash lays, covered in green and brown herbal goo. “What if I can’t remember what happened in a dream like we’re hoping?”

“Well, then, you should’ve never told us about Quentin at all, because we won’t be able to get him out,” Alice snaps.

“Me-yow,” Margo says into the thick silence that spreads out over the room. She crooks her hand like a cat’s claw, both of her eyebrows raised.

“Sorry,” Alice says, her cheeks flushed with shame. “I… I’m just. We’re getting nowhere with this!”

_Let me talk to her?_

Eliot almost doesn’t hear it, save for his own racing thoughts, but he does when Quentin repeats it a second time. He reaches out, places his hand on Alice’s thigh, and licks his lower lip.

“Quentin,” he says when she looks at him with a mixture of confusion and the ever-mounting frustration she’s been feeling the past couple of days.

 _Tell her that I want to say to her_ —

“… that if anyone can do this, it’s you, Vix,” Eliot says, and he doesn’t know why the last word tastes like bile in his throat. “He says he’s sure that whatever the problem is, we can get through it the way we’ve always gotten through it—because you always have an answer.”

Alice sniffs, looking at Eliot like she’s looking through him. “But what if we can’t figure out what got you in there?” Her voice is suddenly quieter, a little bit more human, and Eliot catches a glimpse of Margo in his peripheral vision—good. He’s not the only one shaken seeing the great Alice Quinn let her guard down.

Right. They’re talking. Quentin is saying something like _find another way,_ so Eliot fills in the rest. “We’ll find another way. We always do.”

“Yeah, _we_. You’re not here, Quentin. No offense, but—”

“He says he wouldn’t be good at this shit anyhow,” Eliot relays with a small laugh. He wants to toss back _shut up, hero boy_ , just to ruffle Quentin’s feathers, but Quentin’s still in his ear with—“He says he’s tired of sitting here watching you feel sorry for yourself for not being able to get an answer quick enough.”

Alice laughs at that, and Margo snorts in the background, standing up from the bed and mouthing _want coffee_? to Eliot, pointing at his empty mug, to which he nods. She nods back and grabs Fen’s elbow, dragging her to the kitchen. When he looks back at Alice, she’s rubbing the corners of her eyes underneath her glasses.

“I miss you, Q. I didn’t think I would ever get to see you again. We had just started giving it a shot, and I…”

“I know, Alice,” Eliot replies, not-Eliot.

And he’s really not-Eliot, because his body feels like the carpet just got ripped out from underneath it, then dumped into an icy ocean where the floorboards should have been. Electric shock mixed with heavy, gargantuan dread, pounding the bottom of his stomach with its fists, kneading it like dough. 

“Eliot?” Alice asks from somewhere far away before Eliot pulls back into himself, realizing Quentin is in his head also asking the same question. “What’s going on? Is everything okay with—”

“Everything’s okay with Quentin,” he says, holding up a hand, smiling tightly. “I can still hear him, I just. I’m getting a headache.” It’s a flimsy excuse, but it’s partially true—his head is throbbing from the way every ounce of blood in his body had just swooped to his feet.

Alice frowns and nods, covering his hand—it was still on her thigh, huh, that’s weird—with hers. “Do you think that has anything to do with—”

“I think it’s just a headache,” he says, his face feeling like it doesn’t belong to him. “Thank you, though.”

Alice shakes her head. “No, thank you,” she mutters. “And.. and thank you, Quentin.”

Eliot nods, and he hears the _you’re welcome_ in his head, but he just. Suddenly, very desperately—

“Can I just be alone for right now?”

Alice tilts her head, nodding as she gathers up some of the books. He waves to her—the bed is big enough that if he curls on his side, they won’t be disturbed—and she stands, a bit clumsily. Her legs must have fallen asleep from not moving for a few hours.

“You should get more rest,” she says firmly. “The more rest, the better the chance we have of the dream magic working. And I’ll talk to Fen about the dream ceremony while you rest, and then I’ll check in with Kady and see what she’s gotten from the hedges.”

“You’re just using me as an agenda, now. I’m not Siri.”

“Eliot,” Alice says, the corner of her mouth twitching up. “You’re not funny enough to be Siri.” She says it after a long pause, where the air is filled with all the other things she could have said— _Rest well. It will be okay. We will figure this out._ All the things she could have said but wouldn’t have believed.

Eliot flips her off as she turns to go out the door.

It’s okay. He wouldn’t have believed them, either.

* * *

“… think that’s going to work,” Quentin’s voice comes.

His knuckles are throbbing, bones underneath feeling like they’ve shifted, and he vaguely thinks _am I supposed to feel bodily pain when I’m dead?_ Maybe there’s some sort of grace period, Eliot reasons. Like, you get your body up until you’re off the elevator, and then they take away all sensation with some sort of cosmic vacuum cleaner, or. Something. Whatever, fuck it, his hand hurts.

Wait.

He turns to Quentin, and hears his own voice, coming from his mouth, saying, “Well, I don’t see you having any better suggestions,” and watches, watches as Quentin’s smile curls into a fond little mockery, watches as Quentin shrugs like an asshole and cocks his eyebrow in a challenge.

But.

He’s already beginning to pull away. All he can focus on is the air in the elevator—it’s oddly perfect, unsettlingly mild and whooshing around them just enough to produce the right amount of breeze. All he can think is, _Why does this elevator have the perfect weather?_ as he hears—like he’s listening from the upstairs bathroom in his childhood home as his dad gets a beer from the fridge downstairs—the hints of a conversation playing out between him and Quentin.

“… should be here,” Quentin says. “I don’t think…”

His voice fades back to static as Eliot’s focus shifts—broken glass shards all around Quentin’s ankles. Had they been there before? Had the blood dripping from his side been there? Why was the number on the screen climbing up instead of going down?

“Eliot.” A gasp. “Don’t—”

Mother of fuck.

The orange-pink sun of late afternoon is sliding through the window, and Eliot feels hot all over, the quilt bunched up at his ankles near the bottom of the bed. There’s drool crusting on his cheek, and his arm is creased from where it had rested underneath the pillow.

“Yo, are you going to do that every time you go to sleep? Like, should I just start getting used to this shit now?”

Twenty-Three, standing in the doorway with a cup of tea in his hands. (Since when did they all become such huge tea drinkers? Were they becoming—shock and horror—domestic, now that they were all spending time in the penthouse trying to figure out the Mystery Of The Boy Living Inside Eliot Waugh?)

Eliot blinks. Worryingly, his side hurts even worse now. The temporary absence of pain has given way to a searing heat burning underneath the gash, spreading its tendrils into his hips and stomach. He grits his teeth and feels the sweat break over his brow as he twists himself into an upright position. By the time he’s there, he’s holding himself back from panting.

“You’re gonna have to fill in some of the blanks on that one, Adiyodi.”

“Magic surged,” Twenty-Three says, taking a sip. “ _Again._ ”

“What do you mean, again?” Eliot looks around at the books and papers still on the bed, relatively untouched, and nothing really feels that different. “It only surged when you were in my head.”

“No, last night, too. There were reports of it going off all over North America. Julia got the call from Fogg this morning—and you were asleep then.”

“Me and… most of North America, too, I’m assuming,” Eliot deadpans. “Unless you’re all having a huge party without me every night, which we _agreed_ wouldn’t happen. You know, as part of my treatment plan.”

“Look, I’m with you on this one. I don’t see the link. But Julia, she’s convinced you’re causing it to surge with your dream magic.”

Eliot rubs his forehead. “Okay, let me just—you know, for the audience—break down what the fuck is going on. We’re trying to get me to dream so that I can remember how I absorbed Quentin into me, assuming I had anything to do with it. But the dream magic we’re casting—or me interacting with Quentin on some level subconsciously—is causing magic to surge?”

Twenty-Three shrugs.

“Oh, some fucking help you are,” Eliot grumbles.

“Look, man, I don’t know. All I know is, when I tried to take Quentin out, magic surged. When we try to make you dream about Quentin, magic surges. Magic didn’t start surging until after you woke up, and it’s gotten worse now that you’ve become aware that Quentin is Quentin and not some fucking Jiminy Cricket nonsense.”

Eliot clucks his tongue. “Aww, he would be cute as a cricket.”

“And I just have a feeling,” Penny barrels on, like Eliot isn’t even bantering with him, how rude, “that this has to do with Quentin. I felt it when I tried to pull him out of there.”

Well, great. One more thing to deal with.

“And the problem is,” Penny continues, “if magic keeps messing up whenever we even brush up against Quentin, what’s going to happen if we try to take him out for real?”

And another. Eliot rubs the sleep out of his eyes and motions to Penny. “This is a lot right now,” he says bluntly, “for me to be as sober as I am and to have woken up from the mess I woke up from. So either get me a drink or…”

“Yeah, that’s not going to happen,” Twenty-Three snorts. “You want a drink? Get it yourself. Or make that pouty face at Margo.”

Eliot gives him an exaggerated pout, just for good measure, before swinging his legs over the side of the bed. When he looks back up, Penny is still watching him with a curious expression—the shadow of concern in the lines of his frown.

“I’m not going to be the one to tell you this will all be okay,” Twenty-Three blurts. “Shit wasn’t okay in my timeline and no amount of people telling me or anyone else it would be changed that. The best we can hope for is that whatever bad shit’s waiting around the corner happens quickly so we can pick up the pieces and move on.”

Eliot stares at him, his feet on the hardwood, feeling solid and real for a blissful moment of surety. “Thank you,” he says.

Penny shrugs. “Yeah, well. Whatever.” He turns and walks out the door, leaving Eliot to the quiet of his room, the spinning of the ceiling fan, the fading sun.

There’s something about the way the silence crawls into the room after Penny leaves that has Eliot remembering the moments before he went to sleep. The way Quentin had crooned _Vix_ into his head, the way Alice had said they had only begun to work things out.

“Do you still love her?” he whispers.

There’s no reply. Eliot remembers how Quentin had said something about disappearing for hours, almost like he was asleep, and he wonders if that’s what’s happening now.

It wasn’t any of his business, anyway.

“Hey, Q,” he tries again. “Q, are you there?”

Nothing.

He even tries thinking it— _Quentin, are you there? Can you hear me?_ —and nothing happens. There’s a shock of panic that courses through him like lightning, wondering if Quentin is gone for real, but he manages to soothe that particular panic. He’s just… not available. 1-800-Quentin is busy for the moment.

It gives him a second to stare out the window and wonder. His side aches, and there’s no way he’s going to push himself up and go into the kitchen if he doesn’t have to. He’s just about to call out for Margo when the voice comes, softer than it normally is, almost as if he’s far away.

_Of course I still love her._

Eliot snorts. “Are we on a delay, then?”

_No. I just… wasn’t paying attention._

“Rude.”

_I still love her._

“Well, good,” Eliot says, though the ice feels like it’s creeping back in. “She still loves you, obviously. We all do, but. She’s got the grieving widow thing down to an art.”

_Eliot._

“And, you know,” Eliot continues, because there are words bubbling up in his throat and chest like a volcano, “I always thought you two would work things out.”

_Eliot._

“So I’m sorry you’re stuck with me instead of inside her head. Honestly, that would probably be more fun for you two—do you think you’d get to hear all her dirty thoughts?”

 _Eliot, oh my God._ Eliot finally pauses to laugh, collect himself, open his eyes he hadn’t realized he had closed.

“Sorry,” he murmurs. “I just don’t know what to do about straight people.”

It’s funny—Quentin doesn’t have a body, and he can’t see him when he’s awake, but he can _feel_ the frown Quentin has on his face right now. _Just because it’s a heterosexual relationship doesn’t mean, you know, that it’s straight. That we’re. Or that I’m._

“I know, I know.” Eliot waves. His mouth feels like cotton, and he reaches out for the water bottle beside the bed. “So you’re… going to try and work it out? When you get out of here?”

There’s a long silence again, almost long enough for Eliot to make some sort of dumb joke about scaring another boy off, before Quentin says, _Why are you asking me?_

Eliot shrugs. “Because I’m bored. Because you live in my head and you get the pleasure of answering to my every whim. Because you haven’t really talked to anyone but me in two weeks and we have to keep the conversations interesting before we both go insane. Want me to continue?”

_Eliot._

“I’m hilarious, admit it.”

_Eliot, why—you and I don’t talk about this shit. We don’t. Like, we just don’t, and I don’t even talk about this kind of thing with—with Julia. I mean, I used to, but then she and James got together, and then Brakebills, and, um. The point is, it’s not—we don’t talk about this. Especially not you and me._

Oh. Well, then.

Of course they didn’t talk about this sort of stuff. Before the key quest, Alice and Quentin had been an on-and-off again nightmare of Niffins and stunted sexuality that even Eliot couldn’t keep up with. And Eliot had been in his own thing, a nightmare of a marriage and Idri and trying to figure out the perfect way to make Fillorian champagne. There had been other important things to talk about, like life and death and how to avoid the latter in favor of the former.

And sure, Eliot knew about Quentin’s darkness, and the anxiety that was evident in the lines of his tuts, and the way he sometimes just couldn’t turn himself into a functioning person for a day. And he had hoped Quentin had recognized some of that in him—seen that mirror, understood the game, the necessity of the Waugh façade.

But of all the people Quentin could talk to, it wasn’t Eliot. Not when he had a choice.

“You’re right,” he says, his throat dry in spite of the nearly empty water bottle in his hand. “Sorry, that. I didn’t mean to make it awkward.”

_Eliot…_

“No,” he says, standing up and catching himself on the nearest wall. Cane, he thinks in the blind shot of pain, but he’s thankful for the way his brain is whiting out at the corners because of it. “I should be focusing on finding a way to get you out here with her.”

 _Okay._ The voice is quieter, and Eliot feels something tug at his heart, like a curly-haired toddler tugging on his sleeve.

“It’s funny,” he says out loud, the pain taking over his higher brain functions. “Of all the people, you always manage to get stuck with me. What bad fucking luck, huh?”

Whatever the reply is, Eliot doesn’t hear it. He pushes off from the wall, grabs his cane, and makes his way to the living room.  
  


* * *

  
  
“Should you be smoking in your condition?”

Eliot snorts, some of the smoke coming out of his nostrils. He pulls the badly rolled joint away from his lips. “Now, Julia,” he chides gently, motioning for her to sit beside him on the fire escape. There’s room enough for her if he brings his knees up to his chest, and he does so without it hurting _too_ badly, which means there’s something to be said for Alice’s makeshift ‘calm yourself’ herbal joint. “Is there any condition in which I _should_ be smoking?”

Julia rolls her eyes, a smile tugging at her lips that reminds Eliot he’s still got a killer sense of humor to go with his devastating good looks. She crawls out of the window and onto the ledge, tucking some of her wild hair behind her ears.

“I’m assuming that’s not the fun kind of smoke,” she says, not quite sitting down. Instead, she crouches, poised to stand back up and bounce the second this gets boring. Julia’s not stayed still since the Big Reveal. Stasis and Julia Wicker have never been bosom buddies.

“Anything Alice rolls isn’t going to be the fun kind of smoke,” Eliot teases. “You’d think she’d know how to roll a joint better. Have I failed her?”

“You’ve been kind of a distant father,” Julia says, a hilarious solemnity to her voice. She still has that shit-eating grin on her face, though, the one that gives her away every time.

“Should have known better,” Eliot punches right back. He doesn’t let the memories crescendo at that, but glimpses the knowledge of how a pre-teen boy had pouted his way through his thumb getting pricked, over and over, just to have Eliot teach him how to tailor his own clothes. It’s like remembering that it was supposed to rain tonight, or to turn off the stove. Just. There, no big deal. A jolt, and then nothing else.

“You’re so much quieter than normal now that you have a head mate to keep you company,” Julia continues. She prods a well-manicured nail into Eliot’s thigh through his sweatpants. (And gods, he’s been wearing nothing but _sweatpants_ recently, like some sorority girl that just broke up with her good-for-nothing jock boyfriend that cheated on her with the girl tutoring him in English. It’s not a good look.)

“I like to cultivate an air of mystery,” Eliot counters. “You wake up from an axe wound, you get this certain _je ne sais quoi_ about you.”

“Maybe she’s born with it.” Julia smirks.  
  
The cigarette paper crackles with the next inhale. Eliot’s eyes cross, watching the thin wrapper curl in on itself from the flame. “Any reason you joined me out here?”

“Alice is going to drive me insane,” she says flatly.

Eliot raises the joint. Solidarity, sister.

“She’s freaking about this ritual,” Julia continues. She finally sits her teeny butt down next to Eliot, with her back to the brick of the building. “Doesn’t know what to do next if it doesn’t work. Wants to make sure you don’t have nightmares or wake up too late. Wonders if you dream something, how are we going to know it’s true. Blah, blah.”

“You know,” Eliot says, flicking the excess ash away, “for someone who’s been perfecting the thousand-yard stare lately, you’re awfully calm about this.”

“Oh, I’m fucked up,” she says bluntly. The sky around them is dappling pink and orange against an ever-darkening blue. “But I’m done with letting shit freak me out.”

“Amen.”

Julia’s cough sounds suspiciously like the word “bullshit.” She should really get that checked out. Inside of him, Eliot feels rather than hears Quentin laughing. When he takes the next drag, he lets the smoke settle in his lungs, burn the edges of his chest before opening his mouth just a fraction to watch the smoke curl out.

“You know, I gave up being a Goddess for magic,” Julia says.

“I was there, Prometheus.”

“And when I was kicked out of Brakebills, I would’ve killed anyone to get the next spell,” she continues, unphased by Eliot’s jab. “I’ve fought gods and monsters and everything in between, all in the name of magic. All because I’m that fucking in love with it.”

Eliot feels a sprinkle of rain hitting his head. It’s beginning to drizzle, a drop every few seconds, round and wet and heavy. “We should go inside,” he says, frowning up at the sky. Fuck it for making him move. He’s beginning to realize his own hubris of crawling out onto the fire escape—easier to get out than to go back in, and he’s already dreading making himself into a pretzel just to crawl back through a window. Maybe he’ll just walk down the stairs and go in through the front door.

“And Quentin,” Julia continues, because gods help those who try to stop Julia Wicker once she gets going. “Quentin’s always been willing to do anything for Fillory. It’s his home, you know? It was never Jersey.”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, because what else is he supposed to say? He’s not entirely sure where Julia is going with this. All he knows is, his curls are about to be a hot mess if he doesn’t get them out of the humidity, and he really doesn’t want to be in _wet_ sweatpants. Sweatpants are already bad enough.

Julia reaches over and plucks the dying joint from between his fingers. He watches as she drops it between the cracks in the grating on the fire escape and it plops sadly, fifteen stories below, in a forming grey puddle on another ledge.

“So,” she says, that same smirk on her face, the one where she knows she’s right or she’s in on some big cosmic joke Eliot missed the setup to, “what’s your deal?”

Eliot balances himself on the side of the building. His fingers dig into rough brick as he hauls himself to his feet, cursing under his breath as he moves a bit too fast for his gash’s liking. (Howard, he thinks he’s going to call it. Howie for short.)

“My deal?”

Julia reaches down, bless her, and pulls up the window so there’s a wider opening for them to slip in. She barely has to bend at the waist to duck in underneath, and then she’s standing on the inside, holding her hands out for Eliot to take in case he needs them. She’s so much smaller than Eliot is, and yet somehow, he thinks she’d be able to catch him if he were to eat it on the way into the building. His tiny little Goddess hero.

“Yeah,” she says, making sure Eliot doesn’t hit his head on the way in by holding up the window a bit more, “your deal. Your magic. Your Fillory.”

The L’s roll tauntingly on her tongue as Eliot’s feet find solid ground. There are spots of white in his field of vision dancing like little fairies. “My _raison d’être?”_

“Sure, if you want to be French about it.” But she doesn’t give him the time to come up with an answer. Instead, she barrels on as Eliot straightens at the hip to stand upright. “Because if I were you, I wouldn’t be fighting anymore. I’d have said peace out right about the time Martin Chatwin decided to fuck everything over. You know there’s more kids at Brakebills who have somewhat normal lives, right?”

Huh. His mouth is suddenly dry, and he’s seeing glimpses of the fire behind her eyes that she used to have, that he hasn’t seen in the two weeks he’s been awake and in his body. “Am I in this conversation?”

“You could’ve been one of them,” Julia accuses. Her hand is on her waist, accusing finger pointing right at the center of his chest. They’re standing so close together, and Eliot has to look down his nose to see her fierce expression. “You could have had a normal life.”

“Yeah,” Eliot snorts. “And then Quentin came along.”

Whatever Julia was going to say dies right then and there, her mouth snapping shut, her eyebrows shooting up. Eliot watches emotions pass over her face—confusion, mostly, but something else, something softer and more like understanding, before—

“Eliot!” Alice calls from the doorway. She has a little apron on over her blouse and skirt combo that’s powder blue, tied hastily at the back and covered in flour. “Are you ready to go to sleep?”

Julia’s eyebrows remain in that high arch position as she looks over at Eliot, clearly holding back laughter. Eliot is not so cordial—he snorts, motioning to Alice. “Honey, I’m home,” he singsongs.

She crosses her arms. Clearly, she’s not having it, but it makes her look like even more of an angry housewife. All she needs is a poodle skirt, and she’ll be good to go. “We’ve got to do this now,” she says. “Fen forgot to mention we had to do it within 24 hours of the flowers being picked, and we’re on hour 23. So. Into bed.”

“Not going to wine and dine me first?”

Alice does not joke back. She fixes him with a stare that says _if you don’t get your ass into bed_ , and, well. Eliot’s been on the right (and wrong) end of that stare too many times from too many people to not recognize it.

"All right, all right," Eliot teases. He throws a wink at Julia, a _can you believe what I have to put up with_ , and works his way over to the nest of dark blue covers he's carefully constructed for himself over the past couple of days, climbing into the bed and sliding himself underneath the hefty weighted blanket.

Alice nods, satisfied, her heels clicking on the hardwood as she briskly strides in. Fen scurries in behind her, eyes sparkling with a silly glint, looking more than giddy to help Eliot on this oddly domestic quest. In her hands is a tiny teacup, and it smells—

"God, what the hell," Eliot sniffs, scrunching his nose up. Bile jumps from his stomach to his throat. The distinct odor of an old gym sock who had a one night stand with rotten cottage cheese comes from the cup. "How are you not losing your mind over this?"

"We've been standing over it for hours." Alice shrugs. Thankfully, Julia is in his corner. She has her nose pinched between two fingers and is taking in deep breaths through her mouth.

"Yeah, you don't need me, right?" she asks, her voice high and nasal. "I'm going to go."

Eliot snorts and watches her flitter towards the door, and she closes it behind her with a, "Good night!" and a loud cough as she realizes, "Jesus, does the whole place smell like this?!"

Alice’s nose twitches, little crinkles of amusement on her face, as she kneels down beside Eliot. "You have to sleep with this under your bed and on your chest," she says, nodding to the pillow. "Lift up."

From her pocket, she pulls a small hemp satchel tied off at the top with purple ribbon. It's surprisingly heavy in the palm of his hand as she hands it over. "There’s lepidolite and amethyst in there," she admits. "It promotes a restful sleep." She waits for him to place it underneath his pillow and settle down before she grabs something else from her pocket, a weighty golden chain with a globular locket on the end of it. "Wear this."

"I'm assuming there are flowers in here," and for that, he gets a nod. He sits up just enough again to slip it around his neck.

Quentin’s been very quiet since their talk earlier, and, as Alice fusses with the positioning on the chain, lengthening it slightly at the clasp to make sure the locket hits right in the center of his chest, he somewhat misses it.

"Now," Fen chirps up, bouncing on her toes. She walks over with the teacup balanced delicately on a saucer, and she nearly goes onto her tiptoes to gently glide over and not spill the liquid precariously sloshing against the porcelain rim. On the plate is another small pewter colored star cookie, with silver edible glitter and a flower baked right into its center. "This is the fun part! Oh, I do hope this works. These were not fun to pick, at all. Did you know that you have to sneak up on them in order to successfully pick them, or they'll shoot thorns at you?"

"I did not know that," Eliot says, because how the fuck else is he supposed to respond. And just like that, he can hear Quentin chuckle, and his chest floods with summer sun.

"Legend has it," Fen continues as she sets the teacup down on his bedside table, "that if you get struck by a thorn before your wedding day, you'll never have children."

"Okay, Eliot needs to sleep now." Alice grabs the cookie and shoves it at him. It's downright hysterical, the way her mouth is in a thin line and she's holding a sparkly silver cookie shaped like a little star.

"It’s my bedtime story," Eliot says as he puts the cookie in his mouth. Despite the vile smell, it's not that bad—"Fucking fuck fuck _what the hell."_

Fen frowns and grabs the tea, hastily handing it over. "Drink this!"

Eliot forgets that it’s made with the _same fucking flower_ that caused him to taste the sweet, sweet taste of rotting death and what he assumes is the oral equivalent of being abandoned by everyone you've ever loved and just. Downs it, throws it back like a shot, and the temperature scalds his throat and then _even worse,_ holy shit.

"I'm going to throw up," he gasps. "This is—how is this supposed to make me sleep?" he asks, tears springing to his eyes from how his taste buds are being attacked right now, and he reaches for his water—

* * *

He's in an elevator.

There’s a moment when he’s alone, unsettlingly quiet, realizing he's no longer trapped inside his own body. He can feel everything—the tips of his fingers and the way his side aches in a phantasmagorical sort of way, like there should be an injury there that's not. Like he should be bleeding out rivers of blood, and instead he's just. Standing there. In an elevator. Alone.

And then there's Quentin.

In a blink, he’s there, gasping for air and steadying himself on his feet. Eliot watches as the process of _I'm in an elevator?_ flits across his face, and he waits for the realization to come to him. "Hey, Q. Where are we?"

Quentin jumps and turns to him, eyes widening. "What—what are you doing here?"

Eliot shrugs. "I think this may be another monster test or something."

"No, Eliot," Quentin says, sounding shaken. "I—I'm dead."

Eliot frowns. "You're right here, Quentin. And I'm pretty sure you're some weird part of the Monster trying to test me again or torture me or whatever, or—"

"No, Eliot," Quentin says again, huffing and motioning to the glowing blue screen embedded into the elevator. Numbers are going down impossibly fast— _two billion four hundred seventy nine million three hundred_ —and Eliot feels. Feels everything, feels his feet on the ground and his legs stacked on top of them and the perfect air circulating in the elevator. _Why is there perfect weather in here?_

"I was at the Seam with Everett," Quentin continues. "I got caught in the Mirror World. I'm dead."

Oh.

Right, the Underworld. Has elevators. Did Eliot know that before? It makes sense, somewhere in his head, that he's died a lot of deaths and has lived a lot of lives and there’s probably been a few of these trips he's missing the footage to.

He's on an elevator to the Underworld.

"Margo," he says, the word feeling heavy on his tongue. "She hit me with an axe to kill the Monster. I… I guess my body couldn't handle it."

Huh.

He's dead. He and Quentin, both. They died at the same time. Practically the same moment, if the timing is anything to go by.

He's dead. He's dead. He’s dead.

Quentin’s dead.

"No," he says suddenly, turning to the blue screen. It's an elevator, it's got to come with an emergency stop. All elevators do. So he just starts… pressing buttons, jamming his fingers into the screen, watching frantically as the numbers go lower and lower and his fingers ball and he hears Quentin say _I don't think that's going to work_ before he rams his fist into the screen, with enough force to feel his bones ripple underneath.

Nothing happens.

"Yeah, good plan," Quentin teases. "I'm sure no one in the Underworld has thought of that out before, El."

"Fuck off. I don’t see you having any other suggestions. There’s—"

"I mean, uh, it's like. It's pretty good to see you, you know. I thought, man, it's gonna suck not seeing Eliot after all that shit I did for him. But here you are after all, so. You're welcome? Sorry I couldn't save us?"

Eliot frowns. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Quentin folds his arms over his chest, hugging himself. "You know, when I was about to die. I knew I wasn't going to make it out of the Mirror World."

"What?"

"I just. You know, I knew. There wasn't time for me to make it out. One of the mirrors shattered and Alice and Penny—they got there in time and I knew I couldn't. So I thought, well, fuck. I mean, I was—I _am_ happy," he continues, shrugging to himself. "We defeated the Monster and I think we got magic back and like, you're here at the same time so, you know, added bonus. But it still sucks you died. I was, you know, hoping to avoid that? If that's any consolation."

Eliot feels like he’s being pranked. He's not sure if there's something wrong with the acoustics or if Quentin genuinely just can't hear himself when he talks. "Quentin, we're not going to stay dead, okay. We’re not—we can get out of here. This is bullshit, I didn’t go through six months of being… being _that_ just to wind up dead. You didn't fight for that long just to—"

Quentin shrugs again. It's fucking insufferable, that minute twitch of his shoulders. There's a calm sort of resolve on his face and Eliot does not like that shit _at all._

"I just think… you know, I should be here." Quentin motions to the elevator, ta-da, and looks at Eliot like he’s at peace or some bullshit. "I don't think there's a way out, anyway, and even if there was—"

It's right then, because divine timing has always been a joke, that Eliot’s side starts bleeding. A drip at first, warm and trickling down his leg. Then a stream. Then a river, gushing down and pooling on the floor.

"What the fuck," Eliot gasps. The numbers on the screen are beginning to go up, faster and faster, like the elevator in Willy Wonka, and Quentin’s looking at him with wide eyes. He's beginning to fade, the image of him leaking color and blurring, and Eliot can feel the pain supernova through him, can feel his _body_ like he hasn’t been able to feel it before. Even before, it hadn't been like this, hadn’t been real, and he can feel himself take a breath.

He's not dying. He's coming back to life. He’s coming back to life, and Quentin is fading away, and the light is growing stronger around him, and blood is gushing on the floor, and he can hear Margo sobbing, and the numbers are going up, and all he can think to do is reach out and _g_ rab—

"Eliot, don't—"

He grabs Quentin by the wrist, pulls him hard, and—

* * *

"Eliot," Margo gasps, her hands on her shoulders. "Eliot, holy fuck. Don't scare me like that."

He's sweating buckets. The blankets are tangled around his ankles in a kicked off puddle. Good old Howard hurts like fucking hell. 

"You were thrashing," Margo continues. The room is dark and the clock on his phone reads _3:23._ "And screaming, and I couldn't wake you up—"

"How long was I dead?" he asks. His throat is dry, but he doesn't reach for the water.

"What?"

"When Lipson brought me back," Eliot asks, his heart beating loud enough that he can barely hear his own thoughts. "When you chopped me, how long was I dead?"

"Fifteen minutes," Margo says, her brows furrowed. "You know that." But the puzzle pieces are starting to come together for her, too, because she looks at him and says, "Wait, do you—what did you—"

"Margo," Eliot says. His blood is burning in his veins. He can still feel Quentin’s wrist underneath his fingers.

"Margo, I think I accidentally pulled Quentin out of the Underworld."


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang eats spaghetti. Margo picks some sunflowers. There's a sleepover.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
> 
> sorry this took me absolutely forever. insert excuse about me moving across country here. which, hello, i've moved across country! i'm gonna be moving even more soon! AHHHHH!
> 
> so this chapter is titled YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD PLOT LAST CHAPTER? JUST WAIT. i really have uh, leaned into this one. oops. i can't just write a simple fix it fic, apparently. please take your pitchforks and torches and wait outside for me so i can at least put on makeup before i die.
> 
> thank you so much for all your kind comments, and all your support for me and this fic! it means the absolute world.
> 
> if you have the time and energy, please check out the okra project and notalonehere (the L is a capital "i") on twitter!
> 
> that's all for now. enjoy! hopefully the next one won't take as long, whoops.
> 
> ps: pale tapplescan, it's not for you, buddy

“Well,” Margo says.  
  
Eliot’s head is pounding, still, the concussive rhythm of a bongo drum punching his skull over and over. Time feels oddly still, like it had when he had found out Quentin was dead. Someone pressing pause on the big cosmic button. Everything in inertia, the sound of water dripping in the bathroom faucet, the feeling of looking down the edge of a cliff before stepping off.   
  
And then lightning strikes.   
  
It’s not so much lightning as it is a spider web of glowing blue electricity, jumping from place to place — the TV Kady has set up for him in the corner of the room to his phone to the overhead light to the lamp on his bedside table. The wards around the apartment light up like Christmas, and everything begins to shake, like a low level earthquake.   
  
Quick as a blink, it’s gone.   
  
Margo stares at him from her chair. She’s gripping the arms, legs splayed like she’s trying to keep grounded.   
  
“Did you do that, too? Do I have to start assuming all the stupid shit that happens is your fault?”   
  
God bless her.   
  
Eliot makes to take the necklace off, his fingers fumbling on the clasp until Margo huffs, taking pity and leaning forward to do it herself. “I didn’t — you were sitting right here, Bambi. If I really did something like that, do you think I would be subtle about it?”   
  
Margo grumbles something along the lines of, “You pulled our best friend out of the underworld and didn’t even bring back a t-shirt,” so at least her sense of humor is intact.   
  
Before Eliot can quip back something staggeringly brilliant, Twenty-Three is poofing into the room in what Eliot can only assume are pyjama pants, seeing as he’s wearing no shirt. Then again, Penny in any timeline is all about having the tits out, so it’s entirely possible he could have just gotten back from a jaunt to a church or a funeral service and this is his Sunday best.   
  
They’re nice tits, after all. Eliot is too busy thinking about what kind of working out Penny must do to hear the first half of, “ — just going to have to assume that you’re up to something again?”   
  
“Pardon?” Eliot’s voice is still thick with sleep. To think, it’s only been about five minutes since his entire world got turned upside down. Plenty of time to have made a drink, if his body wasn’t filet Margo.   
  
“Magic. It surged. Again,” Penny explains in the same manner he would explain colors to a three year old. “Does no one else see this shit when it happens?”   
  
“No, we saw it,” Margo says. “Saw it, felt it, got freaky with it.”   
  
Penny scrunches his nose. “I was in fucking _Chicago_ and Lake Michigan looked like the fish were having a rave.”   
  
“Oh, boring,” Eliot bemoans. “We just got some electricity jumping and a fourth grade science fair version of an earthquake.”   
  
“Did you guys see that?” Alice, from the doorway. She’s in a little shift dress with a lacy collar, looking like a Victorian ghost in her sleepwear, and her glasses are askew on her nose. As if on cue, she reaches up and straightens them, smoothing her hand over her hair when she’s through.   
  
“Yes, yes,” Eliot says, “and can you tell the next five people who are sure to be coming into this room we did, too?”   
  
Alice crosses the room in a few confident strides and plops herself down in the bed next to Eliot. “Did I hear you were in Chicago?” Her gaze snaps to Penny as she grabs the covers and pulls them down, then up and over her bare legs. Apparently, she and Eliot are close enough now to share a bed. Who knew.   
  
“Hedges,” Penny explains, his eyes widening. “Which — fuck, I left Kady!”   
  
“Oh, she’s going to kill him,” Eliot says, his voice dry, as Penny vanishes out of thin air. His lungs ache for a cigarette, and it turns out his magic is three steps ahead of him, his cigarette case floating onto his lap like a kitten returning to its owner. “Aww, there you are,” he coos, thumb pressing into the silver latch to open it.   
  
Alice is staring at him with the same unamusement she has for jokes about Santa Claus or cheating on tests. “You took off your necklace.”   
  
“Ah, yes.” Eliot waves his hand in the air. Its flippancy does nothing to cure Alice of her worries. Instead, she glares daggers at him as he fishes a cigarette from his case and pulls it up to his lips. Before lighting it, he murmurs around the filter, “Figured out what happened with Quentin. Surprise.”   
  
Alice jerks forward, eyes wide. Her face hides no emotion whatsoever. Eliot could teach her a thing or two about _keeping it cool._ “You — Quentin — ” She takes the next few seconds to breathe in, steady herself, and come back with a, “What did you find out?”   
  
Margo steals a cigarette from his lap. Mama doesn’t smoke often, Eliot’s learned (well, at least tobacco), but there’s a time and place for proprietary rules about lung health, and figuring out your dead best friend is inhabiting your brain space because you pulled him out of the literal Underworld isn’t one of them. She strikes a flame with her first two fingers and leans back in her chair as the first tendrils of smoke float up towards the ceiling. “Well,” she says, her voice dry. “You’ll never guess.”   
  
And _blip._ There’s Twenty-Three and Kady back in the room.   
  
“We really have to work on the dramatic timing of this group,” Eliot says.   
  
“I think it’s fairly good,” Kady comments. In her hand is a notepad, the large yellow kind, and there’s a small chain twisted around her wrist leading to something she’s clasping in her palm.   
  
Alice huffs, and if she were standing, Eliot would bet money that she would have stomped her foot. “Eliot, this isn’t a game. If you know something about Quentin — ”   
  
“What? You know something about Quentin?”   
  
Julia.   
  
Margo about falls out laughing, and Eliot can’t help but chuckle, smiling around the filter of his cigarette. Penny and Kady share a look and Eliot doesn’t need to have been a Psychic student to read the obvious _They’ve lost it_ thought being shared between them. It’s just funny — Eliot Waugh’s life is becoming like a scripted sitcom or a science fiction television series that simultaneously takes itself way too seriously and doesn’t, complete with perfectly timed comedic entrances.   
  
Alice’s jaw twitches, set into a stern line. “ _Eliot._ ”   
  
“I died,” Eliot says, his words a casual melody, “at the same time Quentin did.”   
  
Alice frowns that same small frown she gets when she’s trying to save the world. It’s the _I once had access to every answer in the universe, and now I can barely solve a math problem_ frown. It settles over her face like a shadow from a cloud, an oncoming storm. “What?”   
  
“For fifteen minutes,” Margo says, flicking the end of her cigarette into Eliot’s ashtray, a dark ceramic dish that says _See you in Hell_ on the inside, “Eliot was dead. Medically. His heart stopped, the whole shebang.”   
  
Alice’s eyes are a kaleidoscope of emotion. “I — ”   
  
“You weren’t there,” Margo continues, “because you were with Quentin. No big deal, really. You didn’t miss much.”   
  
“You missed Margo crying,” Kady pipes in.   
  
“Would you like to see me cry again, Diaz? Because it’ll be standing over your corpse this time.”   
  
“Why would you cry if you were the one to kill me?”   
  
“So.” Twenty-Three walks closer to the edge of the bed and hesitates before deciding _fuck it_ with a shrug, sitting on the end with one hand bracing himself on the duvet. “You — what, you saw Coldwater in the Underworld?”   
  
“Oooh, does he get a prize?” Eliot says to Margo. He loves the way she indulges him, looks from side to side as if to try and find something to adorn Penny with, a token for his good guessing skills. “Yes, Penny, we were in the same elevator.”   
  
This whole time, Eliot realizes, Quentin’s been quiet in his head. He wonders if Quentin is experiencing the same sort of emotional upheaval he is at the realization of what happened. If Quentin was maybe pacing around the recesses of his mind, remembering the way Eliot’s fingers had closed around his wrist like a vice. Remembering how panic had grown in Eliot like a tidal wave at the thought of leaving Quentin behind to die, of existing in a world without him.   
  
Could he forgive Eliot? He had said he was fine with being down there. There had been a sort of peaceful acceptance that had come over him that Eliot had never seen, one that made his blood boil and his bones ache, the bile rise in his throat and the words catch there. Quentin had accepted death like he had accepted magic — something he had always wanted to be real, but that he could never reach until it hit him like a knife to the spine.   
  
Everyone in the room is staring at Eliot.   
  
“We were in the same elevator,” he continues, eyes fixating on the end of his cigarette where the paper is slowly curling back from the flame. He wants to look anywhere but at Alice when he says, “And when I realized I was going to be alive and he was going to stay dead, I pulled him out. Tada.” He wiggles his fingers in a mimicry of jazz hands.   
  
Julia walks over to the bed and squeezes in beside Alice. It’s a California King — Eliot’s a tall motherfucker — so they all fit. Eliot wants to say something about _no more monkeys jumping on the bed_ , but he sees Julia rest a hand on Alice’s thigh, the way Alice relaxes at the contact, and decides to let it be. They all need a little comfort right now.   
  
“So you pulled him out of the Underworld.” Julia’s voice is even and solid. Nothing else feels solid right now, hasn’t for a while. “And now he’s in your head.”   
  
“I guess,” Eliot says. “I mean, yes, but. Why in my head and not in a body?”   
  
“Because his body’s in the Seam,” Alice breathes. Helplessness shutters over her face. It’s been nothing but fierce determination and wild wonder so far, but now, the shadow of doubt crests in her eyes. “I — _f_ _uck.”_   
  
“We’ve got a bigger problem,” Kady says with absolutely no reverence to the rarity that is Alice Quinn cursing. She unfurls her palm, and something metallic catches in the light from the window. Only in New York at 3 AM can the inside of an apartment be darker than the outside, Eliot thinks as she steps closer.   
  
It’s a coin, about the size of the middle of her palm. Rubies glisten in the centre, a small cluster of gems, and as Eliot leans forward, he can see they’re arranged to look like poppies. Wheatgrass is etched, crawling up the curved sides of the coin, and there’s a sigil he doesn’t recognize carved where they meet at the top.   
  
Alice looks like she’s fighting herself-- to either stay in the disappointment and fear she’s obviously feeling or to give into her curiosity. In true Alice style, though, she crawls over and looks for herself.   
  
“I don’t recognize the symbol,” she says, running a finger over the coin to feel it.   
  
“There’s a hedge cult in Chicago,” Kady says, “that worships the goddess Demeter.” Eliot can feel the way Julia tenses on the other side of the bed. “They custom made this. It’s…”   
  
Kady trails off, looking to Twenty-Three for guidance. Eliot’s never seen Kady actually look _hesitant_ before, not like this. Julia stands, tiny fists in balls by her side.   
  
“It’s a protection talisman,” Penny says, eyes trained on Julia. “And the sigil is…”   
  
“It’s a word as bond.” Kady flicks her eyes over to Penny, then back to Julia.   
  
“No,” Julia says immediately. “Whatever it is, _no._ We don’t fuck with gods.”   
  
Penny turns to her, practically on the bed now, _sure, Adiyodi, come on in._ “Jules — ”   
  
“Do not,” she says, holding her hand up. “Whatever it is you think you’re doing, there’s another way that doesn’t involve fucking with gods. You don’t know what they’re capable of. What their motives are.”   
  
“Julia,” Kady says. Her voice leaves no room for bullshit. “This is bigger than us. This is death.”   
  
“Death,” Julia shoots back in a tremble, “can suck my dick.”   
  
“Just tell me what the damn coin does,” Alice snaps. The room settles into silence again, and Margo’s low whistle pierces the air.   
  
“Well?” she asks, stubbing out her cigarette, crossing her legs and leaning forward. “What is the word as bond?”   
  
“Demeter and Hades have a pact,” Kady says. “One that says Persephone can return to Earth during the seasons in which wheat grows and flowers bloom.”   
  
“Every six months,” Eliot supplies. This whole time, he’s been sitting back against the headboard. The constant ache in his side is there, but kind of boring compared to all of the exposition they’re going through at the moment. Eliot supposes he should be grateful for all the bullshit in his life — it keeps him from moping about his broken body more than he already does.   
  
“Correct,” Kady says. She clasps the coin again and steps over to Eliot’s side of the bed. “The hedges believe that any child of Demeter has the right to rise from the Underworld under the word as bond contract.”   
  
“They seek immortality,” Julia says. Boy, is she not amused. “Great, even better. We’re dealing with a bunch of hedges that think that they can skirt death by schmoozing up to a harvest goddess.”   
  
Kady shrugs. A _well, what can you do._ “They’re imaginative, I’ll give them that.”   
  
“Yeah,” Penny snorts, “and now we’re their mortal enemies, because we _stole their fucking talisman.”_ _  
_ _  
_ “Oh my god,” Julia says to the ceiling.   
  
Alice chews on her bottom lip, turning to Margo and Eliot. “So what —what does this have to do with Quentin?”   
  
Kady brightens up at that. Well, as much as Kady can brighten. She goes from a 1 to a 2, at least. “Magic has been surging,” Kady says, “because the Underworld is missing one of its own. Eliot effectively stole Hades’ property. He wants it back.”   
  
“Oh, good,” Margo says. “Now we have _two_ groups of powerful people we’ve stolen important things from.”   
  
“Hades has been trying to figure out where Quentin is,” Kady continues. “But Quentin is hidden, for now. He’s eventually going to figure it out — and he’s going to do anything he can to tear him from Eliot.”   
  
Eliot presses the heels of his palms into his eyes and takes a deep breath to the count of eight. “But we won’t let him.”   
  
“ _Demeter_ won’t let him.” Julia’s voice is small, distant, in the way that it was when she thought Quentin was dead. “He’s a risen child on Earth. He’s protected under the contract.”   
  
It’s a heavy moment. Penny just shrugs.   
  
“We guess,” he says. “That’s about as much as we could gather from the hedges before they started to demand all this shit from us that we didn’t know the answer to. Hedges are intense, man.”   
  
Julia crosses her arms against her chest, her shoulders high and locked in place, the picture of tension. Her guard is all the way up, and Eliot is suddenly very tired. “Are you getting this, Q?” he asks out loud, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear their eyes falling on him now. Suddenly, there’s boiling anger in his stomach for the gods he would fight and the worlds he would burn for Quentin to be okay, and the way Quentin had said _I should be here_ when the whisper of death came blowing by.   
  
Fuck that.   
  
He doesn’t wait for Quentin — who may be the equivalent of asleep, for all he cares — to answer. “So Hades wants him back. Tough fucking nuts. He’ll have to rip me apart first.”   
  
“He _will,_ ” Julia snaps. Her eyes are a wildfire. “He will rip you limb from limb if it means getting him back.”   
  
“ _Let him._ ”   
  
“ _Eliot.”_ Margo, reaching out to grab his wrist and tug him back into reality. His eyes are burning, and he’s struggling to get air. He hadn’t pulled Quentin out of the Underworld just for some fucker to snatch him back. He hadn’t gone through days on end thinking about the last time he talked to Quentin, thinking about how the hope in his voice, the way it lit up around his name, could’ve meant _something,_ if only Quentin hadn’t —   
  
“Eliot.” Kady, this time, stern. “Put it on.”   
  
She thrusts the chain out. It sways in the air, a pendulum, and the coin spins, spins, spins.   
  
He reaches out, grabs the chain, and puts it on around his neck.   
  
He’s expecting something more than the _absolute nothing_ that happens, but Eliot Waugh’s life is only dramatic when he doesn’t want it to be. Figures.   
  
“Now what?” he asks.   
  
“Now we figure out how the hell to get Quentin out,” Alice says.   
  
“You should be protected from the surges with that,” Penny adds, but shrugs like he isn’t so sure, which isn’t fucking comforting at all. “It doesn’t mean they’re gonna stop happening.”   
  
Julia snorts. Her gaze is on the doorway, not looking at any of them. Eliot can tell she’s upset, can tell this is triggering her in a way it wouldn’t any of the rest of them, and he wishes life were simple, for once, for Julia Wicker. “Gods love throwing hissy fits.”   
  
“Right,” Eliot says. “Well, great. We’re back to where we started, but I’m sure that’s just a sign of progress, right?”   
  
Kady lets out a chuckle and rolls her eyes. “I’ll get up some more protective wards and make sure the hedges aren’t location tracking us. They weren’t smart enough to put a tracker on the talisman, but just in case.”   
  
“We should get some rest,” Alice nods. She crawls out of the bed and smoothes down the edges of her night dress. “Reconvene in the morning.”   
  
“With coffee,” Margo adds. “Fucking hell, it’s four in the morning.”   
  
“When did we get so old, my love?” Eliot bemoans to her. She smiles and reaches out, tugging on an errant curl of his, cupping his face and resting her forehead on his. It’s a moment of reprieve, of simplicity, of love working the way it’s supposed to. She kisses the tip of his nose and stands from her seat, stretching.   
  
“Good night,” she announces, passing by Penny and Kady, who mutter their good nights before taking their leave as well. Alice nods her goodbye, chewing on her lip like she wants to say something, but decides against it and ducks out the door.   
  
In the end, it’s just him and Julia.   
  
“This isn’t going to be easy, Eliot,” she says into the dark room.   
  
“I know. Nothing with us ever is.”   
  
She eyes him warily, slowly uncrossing her arms. “Hades is going to stop at nothing.”   
  
“You’ve said.”   
  
“And gods are nothing to fuck with when they want something.”   
  
“And you’ve said that, too.”   
  
Julia’s eyes search the room. She shifts her weight from foot to foot, clenches her hands at her side, breathes a long breath out.   
  
“Julia,” Eliot says, nodding to the empty spot beside him on the bed. “Let’s get some sleep.”   
  
He can see the protest on her lips — that she doesn’t need to sleep in the same bed with him, that she can sleep just fine alone, that they’re not even that close, anyway, what the fuck — but relief floods her features. It’s in the way that her hands finally stop twitching and her shoulders lower, just a bit.   
  
“Okay,” she says, and climbs into the bed.   
  
Eliot feels rather than sees her settling down. She throws an arm under a pillow and hugs a smaller one to her belly, legs curling up. Eliot scoots down the bed until he’s on his back, his only sleeping position these days with Howard The Axe Wound being such a little bitch, and listens to her breathing slowly even out, a soothing melody that finally leads him into sleep.   
  


* * *

  
  
Quentin is waiting for him in his dreams.   
  
He’s got the coin in his hand. Eliot wonders what the policy here is — Quentin must be manifesting the coin from Eliot’s own memory, or something, because the real coin is very much on his sleeping body Out There. He’s not going to get too caught up on the semantics of his dream world, though, because what’s more important is this: Quentin’s brow furrowed, sitting cross-legged on the floor, running his thumb over the ridges in the coin.   
  
“Hey,” he says, stepping forward. Quentin still hasn’t looked up at him.   
  
“So, like, correct me if I’m wrong,” Quentin says, holding the coin up to the light. His eyes get those cute crinkles when he squints. “But I thought, like. The whole myth was supposed to be that Persephone was the one who got the contract with Hades, not Demeter. Because she ate the pomegranate, you know? But knew only to eat a certain amount. Is that not. Am I missing something?”   
  
Eliot shrugs and walks over to him, sitting down easily. He loves this dream body of his — it doesn’t creak or scream when he tries to sit or stand up. He wonders if he can do a cartwheel in here. “Hey, you’re talking to _me._ I couldn’t tell you.”   
  
Quentin frowns. He jumps the coin from in-between his first two fingers to his second and third fingers, a sleight of hand, and when he goes to jump it in-between his pinky and ring finger, it vanishes mid flip. “Tada.”   
  
“You going to pull it out from behind my ear now?”   
  
“Oh, so you’ve seen this trick before?” Quentin grins, finally looking up at him, and Eliot misses the days when his bangs would fall over his eyes.   
  
“Something like that.” It’s easy to tease back, to watch as Quentin’s face dimples and as he kicks his feet out, getting comfortable with Eliot there. Stay a while, lean back. In this world that can only belong to the two of them, in the liminal time between sleep and wake, worries about gods and monsters can go by the wayside.   
  
Eliot should just keep the conversation casual.   
  
“You died,” he says instead.   
  
Quentin tenses minutely, the backs of his shoulders drawing together. “I died,” he confirms. “So did you.”   
  
“Think we can get matching tattoos commemorating the whole thing?”   
  
“I, uh. I mean, as long as yours is a tramp stamp,” Quentin grins, shit-eating. Eliot would stop the world to keep that grin on his face.   
  
“You wanted to stay dead.” Apparently, his traitorous mouth operates under a different mechanism. He watches as Quentin’s jaw twitches, his eyes downcast. His fingers begin to pick at the carpet underneath them, and Eliot wonders if he can feel the fibrous fabric scratch his fingertips. Wonders just how much Quentin still _feels._

"It wasn’t. I mean. It’s not—it wasn't like _that._ "

"Then what was it like?" Eliot doesn't like how clipped his voice sounds or the way his throat constricts just enough to feel tighter than normal.

Quentin huffs out a breath, shrugging up to his ears. "I just. I died for a reason, you know? It was—It was a good enough reason."

Eliot’s face could rewrite the dictionary definition for _deadpan._ "There’s a good enough reason?"

Quentin actually has the nerve to sigh like _he's_ the one being annoyingly self-sacrificial. "You know what I mean."

"No. Actually, Q, I don’t know what you mean."

Quentin’s eyebrow raises. There’s a quick flicker of something across his face, and it settles into splotches of red anger on his cheeks. "No, you don’t."

God, Eliot wishes he had a cigarette. Would it be appropriate to light up in a dream? "And what's that supposed to mean?"

"Just, you know. All your efforts to die have been drenched in tequila and rolled in cocaine," Quentin snaps, "so—"

It would be the perfect time, right now, for one of the Island of Misfit Kids' residents to wake him up in real life. Waves of red hot shame flood his body. The worst parts of his brain light up like a candelabra—the parts that hold his vicious anger, like a snarling hound tearing out the throats that called him _useless_ and _sissy_ and more colorful language, like the lashing tongue that curses the day he was born, like the clawing nails that he’s currently digging into the palms of his hands, hard enough that he would draw blood if he wasn't in a _fucking dream world._

Quentin seems to instantly realize his mistake—it flashes over his features like lightning, guilt and hesitance and a mix of some things Eliot can’t name—but he doesn’t apologize immediately. It’s almost as if his brain is still a few lags behind, because he looks like he’s already regretting saying more when he says, “Sorry we can’t all die glamorously like you.”  
  
Cigarette. Nicotine. Fucking, Eliot would take _chewing tobacco_ at this point. Maybe the rot on his teeth would distract from the way he feels like he has a new gaping axe wound in his side.   
  
But Eliot is nothing if not a painter. He brushes on a small smile, a quirk of the corner of his lips, and his tone is blase as he waves a hand in the air, not a single fucking care in the world, here. “We can’t all be destined for great deaths,” he counters.   
  
The silence grows between them. Quentin is looking everywhere at him — the corner of the ceiling, the elevator behind his back, the carpet below them. Finally, when he looks up at Eliot, his eyes are wide like moons and watery.   
  
“I thought you died,” Quentin says.   
  
“I did,” Eliot frowns. “You were there.”   
  
“No.” Quentin coughs, rubbing at his eyes like a child waking up, sniffling. “No, The Monster. He — it — it told me that you were dead. When you were in there. That it had killed you.”   
  
Eliot nods slowly. He had known this, hadn’t he? Which is why it had been so important to break out and tell Quentin that he was _alive in here_ . Why it had been so necessary he rewatch all the trauma he’d been through like _It’s A Wonderful Life_ except, you know, _It’s A Godawful Terrible Life_.   
  
“Yes,” he says. There’s still something scorching in the pit of his stomach, a residual from _rolled in cocaine_ , but it’s dimming the longer they sit here.   
  
“And you — ” Quentin shrugs. “You broke out to tell me you were alive, and I — I mean, I — I _knew_ it was you, because of the whole…”   
  
“Reference to our fifty year tryst,” Eliot says with another nonchalant flick of his wrist. If he’s going to affect emotionless, he’s going to commit to it. This is the Eliot Waugh Quentin was talking about, so it’s the one he’s going to get.   
  
“But,” Quentin says, his voice quivering. “But then I started to think — you know, that thing was close to a _god._ It knew — it knew about me before I knew about me, before. Before the glamour spell wore off.”   
  
“Which I am sad I didn’t get to be a part of, by the way. I heard _my_ glamour was quite the charming lad.”   
  
“I just.” Quentin scoots closer to him, tucks his knees up to his chest and rests his chin on them, arms loosely looping around his ankles. His shoulders are tucked high behind his ears, tension in every joint in his body, and Eliot thinks of a turtle retreating back into its shell. “I didn’t tell anyone this, but I…”   
  
And of course, Eliot feels the shift in himself. He suddenly has no more energy to pettily act like an unaffected ponce. Suddenly they’re just two tired boys, and Eliot wants to pull Quentin into his arms and feel okay for once, an urge he’s had for longer than he would care to admit to anyone, including and especially himself.   
  
“But what, Q?” he asks, his voice going softer. Quentin’s body reacts to this almost instantly. He hides his nose in his knees, taking a shaking breath, and before Eliot knows what he’s doing — or before Eliot can stop himself from doing what he’s doing — he crawls over beside him and sits cross-legged. With one hand on the back of Quentin’s neck, he guides him — gentle, so gentle, like he’s scared of spooking him — to lay his head in Eliot’s lap.   
  
The part of Eliot’s brain that holds the sound of rain pelting on a cottage roof and the smell of fresh baked bread and the sound of a wailing child breaths its sigh of relief. This is something they had done back — back _then_. Quentin’s head on his lap, turning shallow breaths into deep ones.   
  
Like always, Quentin fights it — not physically, but with a pouty, “No, hey, I don’t — this really isn’t necessary — ”   
  
“Hush now,” Eliot coos. “You were about to tell me something so brave and beautiful and personal, it was going to make me _weep._ ”   
  
Quentin hides his smile by turning his face to the carpet, finally laying his cheek on Eliot’s thigh. “I’d like to see you weep, Waugh.”   
  
“Fountains of tears, Q. Buckets.”   
  
“When he said you were dead, I wanted to die, too,” Quentin admits, so quiet that Eliot barely hears it. He curls a lock of hair around his finger and marvels — he remembers this touch, too, this feeling. Remembers the texture, the softness. If this had been Alice trapped in his brain, would he have the same tactile senses intact? Or is this sense memory unique to them?   
  
Quentin had wanted to die, too.   
  
“Well, now,” Eliot pauses. “I would’ve been just fine waiting on you. Remember, I know how sexy your mid-40s can be. Would’ve been a treat to watch from down there, if I got a view.”   
  
Quentin hiccups a laugh, and he reaches out an arm to draw little circles on the carpet with a fingertip. “I’m being serious.”   
  
“I am, too. You had that silver fox thing going on. Salt and pepper Dad look.”   
  
Quentin had wanted to die, too.   
  
“I gave up,” Quentin breathes out in the next stretch of quiet. “I had fought for so long, and you had just… died. Saving me from Blackspire. And magic was — magic was fucked. Magic was _always fucked._ Everything I loved was just — just fucked, Eliot.”   
  
Quentin had wanted to die, too.   
  
“And you came out and said you were alive, and it was — it was great, for a minute. But then I had to — I had to come up with something, and no one wanted to work with me, no one believed —no one thought we would be able to save you. And I thought I was going —I was going crazy, El,” Quentin’s voice breaks off. “I was going absolutely insane, and nothing I — nothing I had ever wanted was worth the fight except you, but it took, I mean, it _took all my fight._ ”   
  
Fuck.   
  
“For what it’s worth,” Eliot says into the next moment, “no one has ever fought that hard for me.”   
  
Quentin’s quiet, now. He’s still drawing circles onto the carpet with his finger, patterns, sigils. Eliot’s hand still cards through his hair, the solid weight of his head on his lap tying him down. He’s going to wake up exhausted, but he doesn’t care. This is good work. This is hard, good work. Eliot will give it his fight.   
  
“So yes,” Quentin confirms in the quiet. “I was tired. I was — I was ready. And I saw that you had died, anyway, despite my best efforts, and I just — that was it.”   
  
Eliot nods. The worst part is how much sense it makes. The worst part is how Eliot would’ve died long before Quentin ever did, had he been in the same scenario.   
  
Still.   
  
“Say you’re sorry,” Eliot says. For added fun, he gives a small tug to Quentin’s hair, delights in the little tremor it produces for Quentin, tries not to think about _that._   
  
“What?”   
  
“Say you’re sorry, so that I still want to save you when I wake up.”   
  
Quentin tilts his head back to look at him. “Sorry for what?”   
  
“You know what.” Eliot boops his nose with his free hand. There’s a smile painted on his face that’s only half fake.   
  
Quentin’s brow furrows, and his mouth opens on a silent question. He sits up with a shrug, knocking Eliot’s hand out of his hair. “I — ”   
  
“C’mon, Q, Daddy’s not got all night,” he teases, watching him.   
  
Quentin frowns and pouts. He looks downright confused. “I — sorry?”   
  
“For?”   
  
“For — I have no idea what you want me to apologize for, here, El.”   
  
“Okay, I’ll start.” Eliot coughs, ahem, to clear his throat for the proclamation. “I’m sorry for all the death wishes I have had.”   
  
Quentin frowns. “Eliot —”   
  
“Now it’s your turn.”   
  
The fluorescents overhead catch the wetness on Quentin’s eyelashes, twinkling in the light. Eliot sees his chest rise and fall with a heavy, steady breath.   
  
“I’m sorry for all the death wishes I’ve had,” he recites, eyes locked on Eliot’s.   
  
A smile spreads over Eliot’s face. This time, it’s not painted on. “Now,” he says, holding his pinky out. Quentin hesitantly reaches forward and hooks their fingers. “To all the death wishes we’ll outlive.”   
  
He can still feel Quentin, squeezing his finger in promise, as he wakes up.

* * *

“We have to kill Eliot,” Alice announces when his mouth is full of spaghetti.  
  
Fen had given Josh the recipe for her magical Feel Nothing poultice, so it doesn’t hurt when he twists around to watch Alice come into the living room. They’re all in a puppy pile on the floor, on cushions and blankets and pillows from the couch. Julia had made what she called her _famous spaghetti_ , and it was so damn good, even Kady has a stray streak of tomato sauce on her chin.   
  
“Party,” Eliot replies, because _what the fuck do you say to that._   
  
_Ask her what she means,_ Quentin’s voice comes. _Because seriously, what the fuck._   
  
Twenty-Three beats him to it. “Uh, not that, you know, I think you’re losing it or whatever, but you have about five seconds to explain before I start thinking all that research has pushed you off the deep end.”   
  
Alice just huffs, hugging a book to her chest. “Eliot saved Quentin by pulling him out of the Underworld. But by doing so, he absorbed him into his own body.”   
  
“Uh huh,” Kady says, still a bit in the zone with her pasta. She scoops another large bite into her mouth, eyes flicking between Eliot and Alice, like she expects that any second Alice will just pull out a shiv and do the deed herself.   
  
“If we get both Eliot and Quentin back into the Underworld,” Alice continues, “ _we_ can pull Quentin out. Without absorbing him, like Eliot did.”   
  
“Please, keep referring to me as if I’m a sponge.”   
  
Julia shifts. She uncrosses her legs and leans back on her elbows, tilting her head back to look at the ceiling, as if the answer is hidden up there between the exposed support beams. “Okay,” she says. “What about Eliot?”   
  
“We got him back from the dead before,” Alice shrugs. “We have Lipson here. We use a reversible poison. All we need is for his heart to stop for twenty, thirty seconds, long enough for us to grab Quentin.”   
  
“And how, exactly, do we ‘grab Quentin’?” Kady crooks one finger in a mockery of air quotes. The look in her eyes says she’s not about to buy whatever Alice is selling without taking it for a test drive first.   
  
Alice licks her bottom lip, her eyes darting back and forth. She straightens her back, puffing out her chest. “We work with Demeter.”   
  
“ _Fucking_.” Julia falls all the way back onto her back, groaning. “No. Nuh uh. Good try, Quinn. Back to square one. There’s spaghetti on the stove if you want it.”   
  
Penny frowns. He reaches out, puts a hand on her jean-clothed thigh. “Jules — ”   
  
“Do not,” she says, jabbing a finger in the air in his general direction. She’s not looking. She has her eyes squeezed so tightly shut her nose crinkles, her lips pursed like she’s just tasted something sour. “I can’t believe you would even _think_ —”   
  
“We’re not going to go about this like hedges,” Alice snaps. “We’re not some — some desperate cult meeting in a basement or a rehab clinic.”   
  
Josh, who has been watching the exchange like a tennis match, head going back and forth to watch the serves and returns, lets out a low whistle as the lock on the door _clicks_ open. Margo, coming back with a bottle of wine in her hand and a tote bag full at her side. “All right, I got us _plenty_ for the weekend, no need to thank me.” She goes immediately to the kitchen island to set her stuff down, unloading bottle after bottle before she notices the tense silence stretching the air like taffy. She turns, looking exhausted already. “What did I miss.”   
  
“Alice wants to kill me,” Eliot chirps. He can hear Quentin’s chuckle.   
  
“ _Alice_ wants to recruit _a goddess_ to help take Quentin out of the Underworld.”   
  
“Kay,” Margo says, dragging out the vowel a bit. “I see I’ve missed some important moments in our latest very special episode. Can I fix a bowl of spaghetti first, or should I just ignore you all and get the Cliff’s Notes later on?”  
  
“Don’t worry, honey, even I’m confused,” Josh says with a shrug, “and I’ve been here the whole time.”  
  
“No,” Eliot quips, pointing at him. “Honey is mine. Try again.”  
  
“Baby?”  
  
“Uggh.”  
  
“Sweetheart?”  
  
“Have you _met_ Margo?”  
  
“Guys!” Alice almost stomps her foot, Eliot can see it in the way her whole body twitches. “This is the best—the _only_ way I have found so far that might actually work. Because, in case you forgot,” she says, waving an arm in the air, “ _we don’t have a body._ ”  
  
“So we—we make one,” Julia proffers. “Like a golem.”  
  
“Golems aren’t meant for long-term use. After a week, two weeks—we’d have to…” Alice sniffs, shaking her head. “We have to get the gods involved. There’s no other way.”  
  
“Pass the garlic bread?” Kady nudges Josh, who grabs the basket and passes it to her.  
  
“There has to be another way,” Julia says. But her voice is losing some of its fierce resolve. Eliot can see it dawning on her that there is not, in fact, another way.  
  
 _This is her worst nightmare_.  
  
“No,” Eliot says, looking up. “I’m pretty sure Julia’s worst nightmare is losing you, Q.”  
  
A couple of heads turn to him, Julia included, but Kady and Margo ignore him. They’re either used to him randomly answering Quentin (Margo) or don’t care (Kady). But Julia’s face softens, and she turns her body towards Eliot’s, hand going to brush through her own hair.  
  
“Q, we’re going to find a way to get you out of there.”  
  
“We’ve already found a way,” Alice butts in. She drops to her knees on the rug and spreads the book she’s holding out onto the limited space of the coffee table, crowded with wine glasses and bowls of pasta and Josh’s bong. She thumbs open the tome, flipping to a page she’s earmarked and pointing at an intricate series of lines and curves.  
  
“Demeter is surprisingly easy to access,” she says, tracing her finger over the heavy ink of the sigils. “We lay out some offerings, say some prayers, and invoke her properly, we should be able to get in her favor.”  
  
Julia pinches her nose and breathes a deep breath in. Margo’s hand goes to Julia’s shoulder, in-between the blades on her back, and rubs circles there. “Alice,” she starts, turning to her, “not that I don’t think this is a good plan, but what happens if it, I don’t know, goes horribly, terribly wrong?”  
  
Alice shakes her head and shuts the book. She grabs a glass of wine—one that doesn’t even belong to her, Eliot’s pretty sure it’s Josh’s—and takes a sip. “It won’t. We won’t let it.”  
  
“Well, good,” Julia says, her voice pitched a bit higher than normal. “Glad to know the plan will work just because we _s_ _ay_ it will.”  
  
“Julia,” Kady says, turning to face Julia. She doesn’t say anything more for a long, heavy moment, and the two of them are making what Eliot can only describe as _meaningful eye contact._  
  
Julia’s body deflates a bit under her gaze, and she extends her arm, opens her palm in a beckoning motion. “Let me see that,” she says, motioning to the book.  
  
Twenty-Three looks, baffled, in-between them. “What was _that_?”  
  
“We go back,” Kady shrugs, turning back to her bowl of spaghetti.  
  
Julia’s flipping open the book and staring at the ochre stained pages. Her fingertips slide over the edges of the spine, nervous touches to anchor her as she processes, guiding her as she wades into the deep waters of her darkest fears.  
  
 _You don’t have to do this,_ Quentin says.  
  
“Alice, do you want your own glass of wine?” Josh asks uncomfortably. Margo snorts and nudges him in the side and gets up to go pour him a new one. Penny stares at Julia, and Eliot can see the look on his face, his ache to comfort her.  
  
 _You don’t have to do this. There can be another way._  
  
“I want protective wards,” Julia says, snapping the book shut. “I want West Point level security. I want every charm we can get our hands on, and I want a back-up plan for the second—the _second_ things start going wrong. I want an out.”  
  
Alice just nods. “You’ll have it,” she says.  
  
“And I want you to _promise_ me you won’t do anything stupid. Even if you think—even if you think it’ll be worth it in the end. The _second_ things start going wrong—”  
  
“I won’t try to save it,” Alice says. “We’ll end it. Julia. I _promise._ ”  
  
Julia closes her eyes. _You don’t have to do this,_ Quentin reminds Eliot, but his voice sounds touched, and awed, and hopeful.   
  
Eliot doesn’t ever want him to forget this moment—the moment his best friend puffs out her chest, steels her gaze, and says, “Let’s invoke a goddess.”  
  
\--  
  
Eliot’s idea of church is a starched stiff shirt, itchy socks up his calves, and his brothers whispering inappropriate jokes to each other across the pew. It’s Easter Sunday and Christmas and birthdays and funerals and baptisms, all to preserve their identity as _good Christian boys_ , nevermind the fact that his father would show up most of the time half a six pack in.  
  
“Did you ever go to church?” he asks Quentin as he grabs his cane from the bedside. He’s been napping lightly throughout the afternoon, and today—three days after they had made the plan to call upon Demeter—starts the long and winding process of actually invoking the goddess. It’s three nights before the full moon.  
  
Alice has stressed that they all need to be participating in what Eliot can only describe as _reverence._ She’s recommended they pray to her, and every night she lights a cluster of tealights on the coffee table while muttering hymns in Greek.  
  
It’s beautiful to watch, coming from her. Coming from someone like Twenty-Three, it’s fucking hillarious. He’s had the pleasure of stumbling upon Penny praying out loud, saying, “Listen, this is as weird to you as it is to me, but I am asking for your—man, I don’t know. Favor? Is that how this works? Are you even listening?”  
  
He knows that feeling. He knows the feeling of beige, scratchy carpet underneath his knees as his forehead presses into the comforter of his twin bed, the whispered _Are you listening?_ The familiar petitions for the next day to be better. The promises to do whatever was asked of him, if he could just get through a day without a new scar. The pleading doubt in his voice as he wished to wake up healed, different, straight. _Are you listening?_   
  
Prayer and Eliot Waugh have not always gotten along. But if Kady can do it, thumbing over a citrine rosary Penny had found her, murmuring little words of praise and stunted thanks, he can.  
  
 _We only went on like, Christmas. Once or twice,_ Quentin replies. Eliot grunts as he stands up, leaning his full body weight onto the cane for a split second before remembering he has two perfectly good feet and he doesn’t want the wood to slip out from underneath him. The last thing he needs is a broken hip along with his already broken body.  
  
“Yeah, you weren’t missing much,” Eliot says, and Quentin laughs in his ear, bright. “But prepare yourself. Time to go back.”  
  
Demeter likes grains—wheat, corn, barley, rye. She likes oak leaves and rose petals and cornmeal, farro and amaranth and millet. Surround your altar to her, the book had said, with sunflowers, poppies, myrrh, pennyroyal. A decoction made from vervain, sweetened with honey, should be offered and then drank when participating in ritual with her. Yellows, browns, greens—earthy tones, the colours of fertility and the harvest and life—were burned to honor her.  
  
It was a lot more complicated than eating a cracker and drinking a tiny shot glass of wine, but Eliot supposes it’s more fun this way.  
  
Margo had spent the whole day at the park, gathering oak leaves, and Fen had done her part in Fillory, gathering grains and bringing them back with Julia. All for this—his three day ritual in preparation to become one of her children, one of her beloved.  
  
He’s never really had a mom. So this could be pretty cool.  
  
Now, hobbling into the bathroom, Eliot’s overtaken by the smell of the rosewater Margo’s adding to the bath. She’s got flowers in her hair and a long, flowing dress on, looking every bit the part. Fen is humming a song that he’s sure is a Fillorian tune of some sort and placing wheat, binding it into bundles with twine and carefully setting it on the edge. There are candles all around the room, all muted yellows with sigils carved into their wax, flickering hot and higher the more flowers Margo lays into the water.   
  
“I basically robbed a florist,” she says as Eliot takes it all in. “I don’t think there are any more sunflowers left in Manhattan.”   
  
Eliot laughs, but she may not be exaggerating. There are so many flowers floating in the bath, he can hardly make out the sliced fruit — oranges and lemons — that’s been added in as well. Fen brightens when he notices.   
  
“Demeter is your goddess of fertility,” she says. “I thought fruit would be a good offering.”   
  
“Thank you, Fen,” Eliot says genuinely. This is all… over the top, and a bit insane, but this is supposed to be a ritual bath. Might as well go all out.   
  
“I have your tea ready,” Margo says, pointing to a mug waiting for him on the edge of the tub, “and fresh pomegranate,” and sure enough, there’s a small goblet beside the mug that holds the blood red fruit.   
  
Eliot steps forward, hugging his robe around himself a little tighter the closer he gets to Fen. She’s a nice enough girl, just. Not so great memories, there. Not that he thinks she would do anything — she’s seemed, the past few times they’ve been together, to have completely moved on from him, and even seems a bit apologetic about the whole ordeal.   
  
Margo notices and nods. “Do you need help getting into the tub?”   
  
Maybe, but Eliot doesn’t want Fen to see him naked, and an even bigger part of him doesn’t want to admit defeat. He wants to be getting _better_ , not staying the same. So he shakes his head and leans down to press a kiss to Margo’s forehead. “I think this is something I need to do myself.”   
  
Margo nods. “All right, Fen, that means we gotta leave him to it.” 

Fen nods, standing up from where she’s placing the last wheat bundle, and claps her hands together. “Oh, it’s beautiful,” she coos. “I am so glad to have helped.”  
  
“We are, too, Fen,” he assures her. “Now get out so I can get naked.”   
  
Fen sputters a bit as Margo cackles, leading her out of the door.   
  
And then he’s alone in a temple of Demeter. He drops his robe and is naked before her.   
  
_What, no strip tease?_   
  
Eliot bursts out laughing. The solemn moment is effectively ruined, which he really hopes doesn’t come back to bite them both in the ass when the time comes to, you know, actually _invoke_ the goddess.   
  
“What, can you actually see me right now?” Eliot asks, curious. He keeps his eyes pointedly forward, wondering vaguely _If I look down at my dick, can he see my dick?_   
  
_I promise, I don’t look at your dick. I look away when you_ — _wh_ _en you’ve_ —   
  
“Why, Quentin, you seem flustered,” Eliot says with a wink. “Why have we never discussed this before? I’ve been naked around you plenty of times in these past few weeks — have you been _peeping_ on me?”   
  
_No! I just_ — _I just_ told you _, I look away every time. That’s, like, common decency, Eliot!_   
  
Eliot just laughs and crosses over to the tub, placing his cane against the sink across from it before clutching the edge.   
  
_If you need help, you should get Margo._   
  
“First you insult my naked form by refusing to look at it, and now you’re calling me out for being in chronic pain?”   
  
_I can’t believe you’re the one I got stuck inside of._   
  
Eliot smirks, shaking his head as he slowly lifts the leg on his good side up and over the edge of the tub. The water is warm, almost scalding, and Eliot knows it’s because it’ll soothe the ache in his side, but he almost jumps back out. He sets his jaw and muscles through the initial shock, finally stepping all the way in and sinking down.   
  
The water swirls around him, orange and lemon slices bobbing up and down, flower petals separating from their centre. Steam rises from his skin, turning pink from the warmth.   
  
This is church, Eliot reminds himself. They are in a space holy and consecrated. He doesn’t have a problem with that — has no problem with respecting a space for what it stands for. It’s the theatre of it all, the way that the space itself is holy, and existing in it, being around it and near it and in it, gives you a sense of what it would be like to be holy, too.   
  
But the problem is, Eliot Waugh has never felt holy.   
  
Only when the opium caused him to float out of his body and above everything biting at him, or when the hallucinogen of the week caused the colors around him to blur and spin and dance, or when the drinks made his limbs heavy and the thoughts slosh around in his head — only with a warm mouth around him, worshipping him, praying to him, with a boy on his knees like he was God — only when holding a gun to a fucked up monster that would take the person he feared of loving too much away from him forever, cocking the safety, finger resting on the heavy metal of the trigger —   
  
Only then had Eliot ever felt anything close to _holy._   
  
He feels a bit out of place, surrounded by the offerings, the candles, the flowers and rosewater and fruit. All of this stuff, pure in intention, offered up to something greater than Eliot Waugh could ever fathom.   
  
The necklace on his chest, its chain heavy around his neck, feels like a brand against his skin.   
  
“Quentin,” he says when he’s finally settled in the tub. “You can look now, I’m all covered by flowers.”   
  
_Oh my god._   
  
“Not invoking the Christian god, here,” he teases, and he grips the edges of the tub with both arms, breathing in like a pufferfish and dunking his head underwater for a few shocking seconds before coming up for air. His curls are not going to be happy with him later, but they can deal with it when he’s giving them their deep conditioning pampering. Right now, he wants the warmth to surround him, to numb the chill.   
  
“I’m not sure I’m cut out for this,” he admits into the quiet of the room.   
  
_You are,_ Quentin says into his ear. He snorts, grabbing the goblet of pomegranates. (A goblet? Seriously? Margo and her touch for the dramatic is nothing short of genius). Plucking a seed out, he holds it up.   
  
“Um. For you, Demeter,” he stutters before dropping it into the water.   
  
_What was that?_   
  
“I don’t know,” Eliot moans, scrubbing his free hand over his face. “I don’t know how to give offerings to gods!”   
  
_I’m pretty sure you don’t just, like. Toss them in a bath._   
  
“I’m pretty sure you’re not helping, Coldwater.”   
  
Eliot sighs and plucks another seed, popping it onto his tongue and smashing it against the roof of his mouth. It’s bright and tart, and he pops a few more before setting the goblet down and picking up the decoction.   
  
“Look,” he says out loud, because he’s not going to risk doing it in his head, what if she doesn’t _hear_ him, “I’m — ”   
  
He cuts himself off, glancing at the door. For safety’s sake, he sets his drink down and cracks his knuckles before murmuring an incantation under his breath, moving his fingers into the familiar positions and tuts.   
  
_A soundproofing ward?_ _  
_ _  
_ “I don’t need Kady and Josh hearing my prayers,” Eliot says. “Or Alice. God, she’d probably critique my grammar.”   
  
_Alice actually is fairly lenient about grammar shit. She says it’s pretty classist to_ —   
  
“Okay,” Eliot says with a wave, picking up his drink once more. “Thank you. I’m going to try and pray now.”   
  
Quentin’s chuckle, again, a familiar melody. It soothes him a bit as he takes the first sip, the leafy taste of the vervain hitting his palate. Thank god for the honey.   
  
“I know this is the moment in the movie where the guy says ‘I know we don’t talk much’,” Eliot jokes. “But we’ve never talked at all, to be fair. And I’m talking for two of us, here. Kind of. Basically, this is a pretty shitty scene, if you ask me.”   
  
A bubble in the water pops. Right. Not expecting a response. Doesn’t have to be a response.   
  
Eliot takes another gulp of the hot liquid, wincing as it goes down. It really doesn’t taste the best, but every sip takes him a bit deeper into the headspace where he thinks of a goddess, arms full of barley and wheat, skin dark and beautiful and reflecting gold. He can almost see her in the swirling flower petals.   
  
“I’m not a good son,” he tries again. The words feel like coal in the back of his throat.   
  
_Hey. That’s not true._ Quentin. He probably can’t help but listen in, bless him, but Eliot wishes he would do the thing he can do where he apparently goes off in Eliot Mind Land for a bit of a stroll or something.   
  
“It is,” he says, both to Quentin and to Her. “It’s true, and it’s fine. I’ve never — I’ve never _wanted_ to be a good son.”   
  
Quiet, from both ends. Steam rises from the water.   
  
“When being a good son means… taking the end of a belt without crying,” he says, affecting that same nonchalant, theatrical boredom he so loves to use, “it’s not something you really aspire to be. I wanted to be a better man than my father ever was. I couldn’t do that and be his son.”   
  
_You are._   
  
“Thank you,” he says, “but it’s really not necessary. And besides, what I’m trying to say here is — ”   
  
_I mean, it is kind of necessary?_

“—I have never been a good son. Only a bad one. And that made me strong. And _proud,_ ” he says, the word fiercely ripping out from his chest. The drink goes down smoother the next gulp. “And I got to make myself over because of it. I got to invent myself. Create the best thing I’ve ever known.”   
  
_El._   
  
“But,” he continues, expertly keeping the shake out of his voice, “if you’ll have me, Demeter… I would be lucky — honored…”   
  
He pauses, feeling emotion swell in his stomach like a tidal wave. “I’d be ecstatic to be your son.”   
  
He knows not to expect anything, but it still sucks when things remain the same. The sunflowers swirl around lemon slices, the bundles of wheat stay stock still, the candles still flicker at the same height. He sits back, sighing out a breath and taking another gulp.   
  
“Well, I tried.”   
  
_That was beautiful,_ Quentin says.   
  
“Fuck off.”   
  
_No, I’m not being an ass, here. For once. I think you did really well. Better than I could do_ .   
  
“Good thing we’re a two-for-one package, here,” Eliot jokes. He raises his hands in front of his eyes and starts untying the knots in the soundproof ward he’s made, sliding bolts out from their magical slots, like opening a door with a whole stack of locks.   
  
_Seriously. I_ _— t_ _hank you for doing this for me. For trying._   
  
“Quentin, I think we’ve established here that I’m more than willing to go the extra mile for you. Besides, even if I wasn’t, it’d be grossly out of character for me to just give up and give in now. I’ve already put too much time into it.”   
  
_Ha._   
  
“Waste of an investment, really.”   
  
_Oh, poor you._   
  
“And what would my reputation be, then?” he laughs. He’s staring into middle distance now, watching the candles jump and dance, but barely registering them as individuals. All the flames seem to be one light now, crackling in the distance.   
  
Eliot doesn’t want to tell him the truth. Not now. He doesn’t want to tell him that this is the least of what he would do to have Quentin back in a world with magic. To see his love for it in his stupid card tricks and sleights of hand, to watch him struggle with some of the basics, to watch him soar through things no one even has to teach him. The least he would do to see a minute of time where nothing was chasing them, no one was banishing them, there were no marriages or crowns or wars or gods. To see Quentin just be a boyish nerd again, stumbling like a newborn fawn into Eliot’s life, all wide eyes and wonder. To touch him and not feel the weight of the biggest mistake of his life on his shoulders, pressing down its fist into his neck, wrapping its fingers around his throat. To finally forgive himself and maybe —maybe be _brave_ —   
  
_Eliot_ , Quentin breathes. _Look._   
  
Eliot’s eyes slide back into focus. There, along the wall where the candles are sitting, the flame has merged into one, impossibly blended above the wicks, and slowly, slowly, it curves and grows. There is no part of Eliot that is afraid that it might burn down the apartment or get out of control. Suddenly, there is a sense of calm over him he’s never known.   
  
The flame furls up and blossoms, almost too bright, into a sunflower.   
  



End file.
